The future is uncertain for circulating library collections in the wake of wide-scale digitization, and particularly so for scholars who study the “long” 19th century. Lest you think I’m just raising an issue of concern to a small group of specialists, consider that the problem underscores an increasing, and disturbing, trend in research libraries: They are weaning users from material formats. But for some of us, there is no substitute for print. It’s part of the research record.
Let me explain. In most cases, pre-1800 books have been moved to special collections, and, under the 1998 copyright law, post-1923 materials remain in copyright and thus on the shelves for circulation. But academic libraries are now increasingly reconfiguring access to public-domain texts via online repositories such as Google Books and the HathiTrust Digital Library. As a result, library policy makers are anticipating the withdrawal of less-used print collections of books that are not rare in favor of digital surrogates. Large portions of 19th-century print materials will fall into that category.
This transition is occurring with little input from students and faculty, for whom the library serves as the primary research lab. Scholars with an interest in the printed record of the 19th century need to get involved now, before the reconfiguration of the academic research library makes that record inaccessible.
This year, the Online Computer Library Center (known as OCLC) released a report written by Constance Malpas, “Cloud-Sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-Digitized Library Environment.” It focused primarily on the HathiTrust. Comprised mostly of content donated by libraries, many of them major participants in the Google Books project, the HathiTrust is a consolidated digital repository that includes some 9.7 million volumes, of which 2.6 million are in the public domain. (A recent lawsuit filed against HathiTrust and five universities by the Authors Guild and others over plans to include “orphan” works whose copyright owner cannot be found demonstrates the fraught nature of the landscape here.)
One of the hypotheses that the OCLC study set out to test is that, as Malpas stated, the “HathiTrust Digital Library represents a potentially rich source of digital surrogates that might, over time, effectively replace a substantial proportion of low-use print collections in academic libraries.” The report went on to conclude, “It is in the interest of all academic libraries that mass-digitized collections be made more widely available to students and researchers, and that their scope and quality improve to the degree that low-use print inventory can be retired in favor of increased reliance on digital surrogate [sic].”
Such recommendations from leading policy makers in the academic-library community suggest the seriousness of the challenge to public-domain print collections in the coming decade.
Of course librarians have always “weeded” the stacks; it’s part of the process of maintaining a healthy library system. But we are now facing a much larger and more sudden transformation. The movement of circulating collections to off-site storage has become standard practice at many academic research libraries. One gets the impression that librarians are deliberately encouraging trends already in place, getting users accustomed to digital formats, and effectively ensuring the reduced call for and access to the physical objects they hold.
As students and researchers visit the stacks less frequently and demand ever-greater digital access to materials, libraries are under pressure to justify money spent on their print holdings. Books, especially those like 19th-century books printed on poor paper, are expensive to shelve, preserve, and circulate. If few people are using them, and no one is making a convincing case for their retention, budgetary pressures (including the mushrooming expenses associated with providing digital access to materials) will inevitably force the physical books off the shelves.
I work daily with projects involved in digitizing the historical record of the great age of industrial printing. Our collective goal, in the University of Virginia’s Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (Nines), is to open up those materials to various kinds of search, visualization, contextualization, and collaborative research. At the same time, Nines has always stressed that digital archives are not replacements for the material texts they represent; rather, they are simulations or models.
The books on the shelves carry plenty of information lost in the process of digitization, no matter how lovingly a particular copy is rendered for the screen. There are vitally significant variations in the stacks: editions, printings, issues, bindings, illustrations, paper type, size, marginalia, advertisements, and other customizations in apparently identical copies. Such evidence is necessary for us to understand what books were, how they functioned, how they were produced and consumed across time, and what they meant to past cultures and other readers.
Moreover, in the case of Google Books and HathiTrust, the emphasis has been on quantity over quality. If our academic research libraries replace large swaths of 19th-century artifacts with hastily executed scans, they will be trading away irreplaceable legacies and gutting disciplines that rely on the evidence of the past, especially history, bibliography, textual criticism, and the history of the book. They will also be putting the real world of the historical book ever farther out of reach of students, even as they are ostensibly providing access to it via surrogates. In such a future, 19th-century books as things of paper and ink will be truly forgotten.
Humanities scholars have a vested interest in lobbying for the retention of the printed record in the general collections of academic research libraries. Such collections are places for discovery and the foundation of entire disciplines. This archive of the history of the making and consumption of books cannot be replaced by single-copy scans; and new scholars of the historical record cannot be trained on simulations.
Such projected deaccessioning raises larger definitional questions that should engage us all: What are academic research libraries for? To what extent is the university invested with the stewardship of the past? How will the humanities change in a digital age? What was a book?
To be effective, the case for the retention of printed books in the circulating collections of academic research libraries cannot take the form of general laments or calls to save everything. Searching conversations should be had, priorities agreed upon, and avenues for collaborative fund raising explored, before the trucks come to take away the printed record of periods like the long 19th century for good.
