Wednesday November 15, 2006

The invisible hand of the library in the marketplace

I'm all hopped up on Kim Duckett's and Scott Warren presentation to the NCSU Librarians Association. Kim and Scott rock! They talked about how explaining the economic role of the library is a good way to teach students why to use the library.

Their talk and an observation by our colleague Josh Wilson got me to thinking about how truly weird the library's economic role is in one particular scenario -- patrons Googling journal articles from on campus. They go from Google (or Yahoo, or a link on some random web page) straight to full text articles. I'm not talking about open access journals. I'm talking about articles in big-money journals published by Elsevier, Springer, et. al. If patrons are on campus, they get to the text seamlessly, no cost, no hassle, no need to use library databases or Journal List. The weird thing is that not only is the article free, there's no notice that it cost anyone, anywhere a dime. This works because Springer et. al. treat an NCSU IP address like a "paid in full" receipt. (Off-campus versions of this story are more complicated, and I won't get into them here.)

I'm all for seamless access, but it sure seems like we, the library, should drop a note in the middle of that process that says "Paid for by NCSU Libraries" Or, to borrow an idea from Andrew Pace, a discount sticker that says "This cost $___, you pay $0, you save 100%." The way we do it now is like an auto mechanic sneaking into a customer's garage at night, silently providing a free tune-up, and deliberately not leaving a "Free tune-up by ACME Garage" note. The car owner is left thinking that his car is never needs servicing. Credit, in the customer's mind, goes to Honda. In our journal article case, credit in a patron's mind goes where? Google? That Springer outfit that provides all the free stuff?

Note that my prescription, dropping a "Paid for by NCSU Libraries" notice in the Google-to-Springer path, is not something we can do. Our servers are not in that path. We would have to ask Springer to do it. And Elsevier, and Wiley, and Nature, and ...

One of the valuable parts of Kim's and Scott's presentation is that it opens students' eyes to something they don't know about. "Lifting a veil" is Kim's metaphor. What can we do systematically to make the economics visible without interfering with the easy access that we also value?