Library Collaborations: Why and How
David W. Lewis
Living the Future 7
Transforming Libraries Through Collaboration
Tucson, AZ
May 2, 2008
© 2008 David W. Lewis. Permission to use this work is granted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license (3.0). You are free: to share, to copy, distribute,
display, and perform the work, to remix, and to make derivative works under the following conditions: 1. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor
(but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), and 2. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. For any reuse or distribution, you must
make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Apart from the remix rights granted
under this license, nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
Agenda
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Definitions
My Sources
Depressing Opening Quote
Prologue: Winning at Prisoner’s Dilemma
Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century
– Sustaining Changes
– Disruptive Changes
ChaCha
Free!
Better Than Free
Story 1 and Story 2
Rant
Governing the Commons
Learning from Open Source
The Cooperation Revolution
Final Optimistic Quote
Our Task
col·lab·o·rate
Pronunciation: \kə-ˈla-bə-ˌrāt\
Etymology: Late Latin collaboratus, past participle of collaborare to labor together,
from Latin com- + laborare to labor
1. to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor
2. to cooperate with or willingly assist an enemy of one's country and especially
an occupying force
3. to cooperate with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not
immediately connected
co·op·er·ate
Pronunciation: \kō-ˈä-pə-ˌrāt\
Etymology: Late Latin cooperatus, past participle of cooperari, from Latin co- +
operari to work — more at
1. to act or work with another or others : act together or in compliance
2. to associate with another or others for mutual benefit
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary
Robert Axelrod
The Evolution of Cooperation
Basic Books, 1984
Revised edition, 2006
Elinor Ostrom
Governing the Commons: The Evolution of
Institutions for Collective Action
Cambridge University Press, 1990
Clayton M. Christensen
Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great
Firms to Fail
Harvard Business School Press, 1997
Revised edition, 2003
Steven Weber
The Success of Open Source
Harvard University Press, 2004
Clay Shirky
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without
Organizations
Penguin Press, 2008
Opening Quote from Shirky
“New technology makes new things possible: put another
way, when new technology appears, previously impossible
things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things
are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change
becomes a revolution.”
“The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolution
cannot be contained by the institutional structure of existing
society. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down,
or some of those institutions are altered, replaced, or
destroyed.”
Opening Quote from Shirky
“Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this
change without significant alteration, and the more an
institution or industry relies on information as its core
product, the greater and more complete the change will be.”
page 107
Prologue: Winning at Prisoner’s Dilemma
Axelrod’s Question:
“Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of
egoists without central authority?” page 3
Prologue: Winning at Prisoner’s Dilemma
Player 1 Cooperates
Player 2 Cooperates
Player 2 Defects
Player 1 Defects
Player 1 – 3 points, Player 2 – 3 points
Player 1 – 5 points, Player 2 – 0 points
Reward for Mutual Cooperation
Temptation to Defect and Sucker’s
Payoff
Player 1 – 0 points, Player 2 – 5 points
Player 1 – 1 points, Player 2 – 1 points
Temptation to Defect and Sucker’s
Payoff
Punishment for Mutual Defection
Prologue: Winning at Prisoner’s Dilemma
• Axelrod ran several iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments
for computer programs
• The winning program was TIT FOR TAT
• TIT FOR TAT’s Strategy:
1. Begin with cooperation
2. Respond to cooperation with cooperation
3. Respond to defection with defection
• TIT FOR TAT rarely won individual games, but was the best at
eliciting cooperation from other programs and so won the
tournaments
Prologue: Life Lessons from TIT FOR TAT
1. Don’t be envious — the success of others is a prerequisite
for your own success
2. Don’t be the first to defect — cooperate as long as you get
cooperation in return
3. Reciprocate both cooperation and defection — not forgiving
and forgiving to easily can both be costly
4. Don’t be too clever — being incomprehensible is dangerous,
to encourage cooperation you need to make it easy for
others to see your intentions
Prologue: Final Word from Axelrod
Enlarge the shadow of the future.
“No form of cooperation is stable when the future in not
important enough relative to the present.” page 129
Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First
Quarter of the 21st Century
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Complete the migration from print to electronic collections
Retire legacy print collections
Redevelop library space
Reposition library and information tools, resources, and
expertise
Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials
to curating content
David W. Lewis, “A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21 st Century,” College & Research Libraries
September 2007 available at: http://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/1592
Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First
Quarter of the 21st Century
1.
2.
3.
Complete the migration from print to electronic collections
Retire legacy print collections
Redevelop library space
We know how to do the first three things
We can do then by ourselves or with established partners
The change is sustaining, not disruptive
Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First
Quarter of the 21st Century
4.
5.
Reposition library and information tools, resources, and
expertise
Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials
to curating content
Likely to involve disruptive change
Good chance that the best solutions will be at the network, not
the campus, level — the question of scale
We will need to find and collaborate with new partners
Disruptive Change
From Christensen
• Different value proposition — usually easier, faster, and
cheaper
• Initially unappealing to high-end users because of limited
functionality, but appeals to unsophisticated or new users for
whom it is good enough
• New value proposition allows quality and functionality to
develop more quickly than old approaches
• Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica
• Google Scholar versus traditional indexes
Questions of Scale
• Where are the economies of scale in operations? Where for
innovation?
• Individuals can use the network (the “cloud”) to do their work
without institutionally based infrastructure
• Neither libraries, nor their campuses, nor even collections of
libraries or campuses are likely to be able to successfully
compete with:
– Google to search the Web
– Google or YouTube to create collections of content
– Amazon for information on books
– Wikipedia as a source of quick answers
New Partners
• Traditional partners and alliances will not be sufficient
• Need to find ways to work with the network level providers
– They will not want to deal with individual libraries
• We can not create new forms of scholarly communication
from within our current silos
Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First
Quarter of the 21st Century
4.
5.
Reposition library and information tools, resources, and
expertise
Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials
to curating content
“My experience with librarians, at least in scientific university libraries (I’m
a scientist) is that they are basically incapable of anything beyond using
the keywords in their database.”
“Wikipedia is becoming the reference desk, because it actually provides
lists of relevant materials instead of dropping users in front of databases.”
— Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus BLOG,
June 27, 2007
“Nature Precedings is a free service from NPG that provides a way for
researchers to share preliminary findings, solicit community feedback, and
claim priority over discoveries. By promoting the rapid and open exchange
of scientific information, the site ultimately aims to help accelerate the
pace of discovery.”
— Press Release from the Nature Publishing Group, June 8, 2007
“Scientists Get a YouTube of Their Own. The National Science Foundation,
the Public Library of Science, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center
are hoping that their new Web site — billed as a YouTube for scientists —
will help demystify important research papers. The site, called SciVee, will
allow scientists to upload highly technical papers. But it will also let the
researchers post accompanying video presentations that serve as quicker,
more approachable guides to their work.”
Chronicle of Higher Education,
Wired Campus BLOG,
August 22, 2007
“By searching with a Guide your query is sent to a real person who is
skilled at finding information on the Internet and knowledgeable on the
subject at hand so that you get the few exact results you want, not the
millions of results you don't.
ChaCha only provides quality, human approved results. The more you use
ChaCha, the smarter and faster ChaCha becomes! Because ChaCha saves,
rates, and updates all the answers that are hand-picked by our Guides.
ChaCha's intelligent Guide application learns from every search so our
Guides know where to look to find information for you quickly.”
IU and ChaCha partner to create first of its kind academic search service
Alliance to leverage IU’s knowledge assets and ChaCha’s innovative human-guided search technology
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Aug. 2, 2007 INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana University President Michael A. McRobbie and Scott A. Jones,
co-founder and chief executive officer of ChaCha, an Indiana company that is creating a new and
more focused way of providing Internet searches, today (Aug. 2) announced they have entered into a
strategic alliance for research, development and services for the next generation of Internet search
tools and practices.
This new partnership will incorporate the collective knowledge and experience of the university's
library and information technology staff into ChaCha's new search engine architecture, which
combines a sophisticated machine-based search with skilled human guides who can quickly bring
focus and precision to the search product...
It will enable IU and ChaCha to develop a better understanding of how guided search can best serve
the complex needs of students, faculty and academic researchers…
By combining machine-based searches with input from human guides, ChaCha is able to offer users
the ability to receive instant results, just like a traditional search engine, but the guides help the user
focus on relevant information and eliminate unwanted material…
IU librarians, information technology staff and others will serve as guides, available to help the IU
community conduct searches through a live instant message chat interface, identify exactly what
information the user is seeking, refine the search for the user and then display only the most relevant
results.
See: https://www.chacha.com/ for what ChaCha is currently doing.
Lessons (so far) from IU/ChaCha Partnership
• We had hope to get access to technology to manage a knowledge
base and chat interactions
– Network level services don’t scale down easily
– IU’s need to control access was problematic — Straddling the
open content/proprietary content boundary is problematic
• Working with an early stage start-up company is interesting — They
are not like us
– Short term focus
– Move quickly
– People change rolls and come and go
Lessons (so far) from IU/ChaCha Partnership
• Internal collaboration with computing organization has
developed
• The university is thinking about search and responding to user
queries in a different way
• We care about mobile answers, but…
• ChaCha is still developing technology to support the people
answering questions — this could prove useful
• We are rethinking how the project should work
Collaboration to Reposition Expertise and
Resources
• Many resources and services will move to the network level
with disruptive technologies and new service models — most
will be open
• Individual libraries will have an increasingly hard time
competing
• Libraries have minimal capacity to innovate at the required
scale
• Libraries have minimal capacity to change their existing
service models
Chris Anderson, “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” Wired Magazine 16.03 http://www.wired.com/wired/issue/16-03/
Movie is at: http://www.wired.com/wired/issue/16-03/
Better Than Free
“When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not
be copied.
Well, what can't be copied?
There are a number of qualities that can't be copied. Consider
"trust." Trust cannot be copied. You can't purchase it. Trust
must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or
faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else
is equal, you'll always prefer to deal with someone you can
trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a
copy saturated world.”
Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Free,” The Technium
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php
Eight Generatives Better Than Free
“Immediacy -- Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want,
but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released -- or
even better, produced -- by its creators is a generative asset.”
“Personalization -- A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if
you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular
living room -- as if it were preformed in your room -- you may be willing to
pay a lot.”
“Interpretation -- As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000.
But it's no joke. A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache,
and others make their living doing exactly that.”
Eight Generatives Better Than Free
“Authenticity -- You might be able to grab a key software application for
free, but even if you don't need a manual, you might like to be sure it
is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You'll pay for authenticity.”
“Accessibility -- Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things
tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And
in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many
people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our
"possessions" by subscribing to them.”
“Embodiment -- At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can
take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps
you'd like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are
fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on
bright white cottony paper, bound in leather.”
Eight Generatives Better Than Free
“Patronage -- It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to
reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their
appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if
it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money
will directly benefit the creators.”
“Findability -- Where as the previous generative qualities reside within
creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in
the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention
to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its
price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are
worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of
films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our
attention -- and most of it free -- being found is valuable.”
How Will Academic Libraries Do?
• Immediacy — Can’t compete, will move to the network level
• Personalization — Can’t compete, will move to the network
level
• Interpretation — Maybe if we develop deep relationships
• Authenticity — Maybe if we can maintain the library brand
• Accessibility — Maybe, but will require changes in faculty
behavior
• Embodiment — Maybe since we have physical items
• Patronage — Only at the margins
• Findability — Can’t compete, has already moved to the
network level
Collaboration to Move from Purchasing
Materials to Curating Content
• Digitizing print-based content
• Capturing and preserving born digital content
Story 1
http://indiamond6.ulib.iupui.edu/irishnews/
Story 2
http://www.policyarchive.org
Collaboration to Move from Purchasing
Materials to Curating Content
•
•
•
•
Open Access will succeed
The structure of scholarly communication will change
Users will be less dependent on local library collections
Libraries will not have to purchase as much content
• We will be free to invest digital projects for our campuses
Or Not, the Rant
“We need to begin with a fundamental fact — the cost of scholarly
journals has increased at 10% per year for the last three decades.
This is over six times the rate of general inflation and over two and a half
times the rate of increase of the cost of health care.
Between 1975 and 2005 the average cost of journals in chemistry and
physics rose from $76.84 to $1,879.56. In the same period, the cost of a
gallon of unleaded regular gasoline rose from 55 cents to $1.82. If the
gallon of gas had increased in price at the same rate as chemistry and
physics journals over this period it would have reached $12.43 in 2005,
and would be over $14.50 today.”
David W. Lewis, “Library Budgets, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Communication,” Forthcoming in the
May issue of C&RL News
Need to change the way scholarship is done or journal cost
will continue to sap our resources
Need to move from Proprietary Scholarship to Open
Scholarship
Opportunity costs of not doing so are very high
Governing the Commons
• Ostrom looks at self governing systems for managing
common-pool resources (CPR) — for example, water or fishing
rights
• Open Scholarly Commons is different
– The good provided is non-rival
– Appropriation of the resource is not a significant problem
– Provision of the good has both public good and CPR
aspects
– Our problem will be on the provision side — How do we
create the resource?
Governing the Commons
• Provision of the Open Scholarly Commons requires two things
– Infrastructure
– Scholars prepared to use the infrastructure
• Infrastructure is a public good which can be provided at a
variety of levels from national to individual institutions
– There will be free riders — This is OK
– Vested interests will fight to stop or slow developments,
especially at the national level
• This is the easy part
Governing the Commons
• Scholar’s decisions
– The work, and how it is put into the system, has both
public and private benefits
– How do we rebalance how these benefits are exercised?
– Do institutions exert their rights to manage public
benefits?
– Do scholars exert their rights to private benefits more
responsibly? What are the incentives?
– Need to changes the norms that drive practice
• This is the hard problem
Learning from Open Source
From Weber
“I explain the creation of a particular kind of software—open
source software—as an experiment in social organization
around a distinctive notion of property. The conventional
notion of property is, of course, the right to exclude you from
using something that belongs to me. Property in open source
is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not
the right to exclude.”
page 1
This makes large scale non-hierarchical cooperation is possible
Learning from Open Source
• Change the way scholarship, as property, functions — the
right to distribute not to exclude
– Creative Commons licenses
– NIH or Harvard mandates
• Scholarship, like open source software, is not simply a
nonrival — it is antirival
– Nonrival — Use does not diminish the good
– Antirival — Use enhances the value of the good
“Open source turns what would have been called free riders
into contributor to a collective good.” page 216
Learning from Open Source
“Open source developers perceive themselves as trading
many copies of their own (single) innovation for many single
copies of others’ innovations.” page 159
• Scholars don’t generally see the trade this way
– Rather access to other’s innovation is perceived as a right
that they are owed by their institution
– Delivering this perceived right is the library’s problem
• We need to change the way this “bargain” is viewed
Learning from Open Source
From Shirky — Open Systems are successful because they:
1. Lower the cost of failure, but not the likelihood of failure
— this provides the means to explore multiple
possibilities and increases the likelihood of finding
successful solutions
2. Do not create a bias in favor of predictable but
substandard outcomes
3. Make it simple to integrate the contributions of people
who contribute only one good idea
page 245
The Cooperation Revolution
• From Shirky
“The centrality of group effort to human life means that
anything that changes the way groups function will have
profound ramifications for everything from commerce and
government to media and religion.”
page 17
“We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our
ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take
collective action, all outside the framework of traditional
institutions and organizations.”
page 21
The Cooperation Revolution
“The difficulties that kept self-assembled groups from working
together are shrinking, meaning that the number and kind of
things groups can get done without financial motivation or
managerial oversight are growing. The current change in one
sentence is: most of the barriers to group action have
collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore
new ways of gathering together and getting things done.”
Page 22
The Cooperation Revolution
• Mass Amateurization — Large Scale Sharing
“An individual with a camera or a keyboard is now a non-profit
of one, and self-publishing is now the normal case… This
technological story is like literacy, wherein a particular
capacity moves from a group of professionals to become
embedded within the society itself, ubiquitously, available to a
majority of citizens.”
pages 77-78
• Publish then Filter — Mass amateurization of publishing
requires mass amateurization of filtering
The Cooperation Revolution
“When a profession has been created as a result of some
scarcity, as with librarians or television programmers, the
professionals are often the last ones to see it when that
scarcity goes away. It is easier to understand that you face
competition than obsolescence.”
pages 58-59
Are we like the scribes?
The Cooperation Revolution
• Successful social tools require three things:
1. A plausible promise — attracts users
2. An effective tool — makes community possible
3. An acceptable bargain — creates community
• How do we create a set of social tools that create Open
Scholarship?
• The hard part is the plausible promise and the acceptable
bargain
Final Quote
From Shirky
“Emblematic of the dilemmas created by group life, the
phrase “free-for-all” does not literally mean free for all but
rather chaos. Too much freedom, with too little management,
has generally been a recipe for a free-for-all. Now, however, it
isn’t. With the right kinds of collaborative tools and the right
sort of bargain with users, it is possible to get a large group
working on a project that is free for all.”
page 253
Our Task
Create the tools and communities for open scholarship so
knowledge can be abundant in our communities
Peter Senge — The world’s knowledge belongs to the world
This can only be the product of cooperation and
collaboration.
Comments or
Questions ?
David W. Lewis
dlewis@iupui.edu
© 2008 David W. Lewis. Permission to use this work is granted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license (3.0). You are free: to share, to
copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, to remix, and to make derivative works under the following conditions: 1. You must attribute the work in the manner
specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), and 2. You may not use this work for commercial
purposes. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get
permission from the copyright holder. Apart from the remix rights granted under this license, nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.