Arrr, how ye be getitng ye textbook?

So, let's get this straight right off the bat - I am in no way asking you to self incriminate in any way.

That said, however, I do wonder what hoops you have had to jump through in order to get access to the required textbooks for your class? If this recently published study is to be believed, you might have been like one of the 25% of surveyed students who resorted to illegally downloading a copy of an eTextbook.

Here in the library we are directly impacted by those rising costs as well, which is why we can not possibly have on hand a copy of every textbook used on campus; we could spend our entire annual budget on textbooks and only buy a fraction of them you need. And, unlike those in the survey (perhaps unfortunately), our professional code forbids us from resorting to piracy. This leaves us with the question - how do how do we work together to get you access to the textbooks you need without breaking either of our banks or the law?

Though I am sure my colleagues in our Book and Document Delivery department, specifically those who work on providing reserves, might have more to say on this than I do, there are a couple things that come to mind. One, perhaps more long term solution is to support open access projects like Open Access Textbooks. They are a grant funded organization, based in Florida, that is working to set a model for states around the nation for Creative Commons licensed textbooks.

Another might be to call out publishers for their predatory pricing practices, as @techdirt mentions in the above tweet. But again this is more of a long term solution. And, while encouraging faculty to author more open access textbooks, and publishers to reign in their tactics, might be fine goals, they're not particularly helpful for you today.

Another strategy that might help more quickly, is to encourage your faculty to partner with the library to provide the textbooks you need on reserve. Talk to them about the very real impact the skyrocketing cost of course materials is having on you, and refer them to us. We have policies and procedures in place to help them provide you with the materials you need in your classes.

And, in the meantime, what other solutions have you found to this problem?

Finding Inspriration from the Great Library of Alexandria

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (photo: Argenberg)

If you are a student, you probably have a feeling that textbooks are enormously expensive. It turns out that over the past few decades the cost of textbooks have been rising at a rate much higher than inflation, even outstripping the rate of medical services.

For this reason, one of the most common questions students ask at the beginning of the semester is whether Langsdale Library has a copy of their textbook. In some instances we do have a copy, but it is usually put on reserve for in-library use since we only have one copy available. However, in most cases we do not have textbooks or maybe we only have an older edition, because we simply cannot afford to buy new editions of every textbook used on campus while still providing the resources students, staff, and faculty need to do independent research.

So, what can a library do?  Well, it turns out we have found inspiration in an article by Daniel Heller-Roazen entitled “Tradition’s Destruction: On the Library of Alexandria.” According to Heller-Roazen, one of the ways the Library of Alexandria became so great was by adopting a rather aggressive collection development policy. By aggressive, what I really mean is stealing. Apparently when ships would visit Alexandria, if there was a scroll on board that the library did not have, they would simply take it, make a copy and keep the original for themselves. They would also borrow items from other libraries, make a copy and keep the originals for themselves.

So, if that worked for the Great Library of Alexandria, why couldn’t it work for the Great Library of Langsdale? In today’s more enlightened times, we have laws that prevent us from fully following the Library of Alexandria model. As I am sure you have figured out, the laws to which I am referring are the copyright laws which prevent us from making an unauthorized copy to give back to the original owner. As a state institution, what we can do is use the doctrine of eminent domain to confiscate books for the general good of the UB community. Eminent domain does demand that owners be fairly compensated for their property, however we are pretty sure we can get around that by merely offering a credit towards any fines the textbooks' original owners may incur during their stay at UB.

So this summer we will start a pilot program where, for the first few weeks of the semester, we will be checking the bags of all visitors to Langsdale Library.  If you have a current edition of a textbook that we do not already own, we will take it and put it on reserve for the class. Don’t worry, you can still read it in the library. Well, as long as none of your classmates are using it. Plus you can use your late fee waiver to keep that book out overnight once or maybe even twice before having the fines exceed the value of the waiver.  So if you are lucky enough to have your textbook chosen for this pilot program, go ahead and keep that DVD out a few extra days over the summer, and rest happy in the knowledge that the textbook you purchased is now going to help the entire class.

Happy April 1 everyone.

Information wants to be expensive.

flickr user nirak

In the late 60's, Stewart Brown posited that information wants to be expensive and free at the same time. That the tension between these competing desires will not go away, they will always fight one another. This continues to be true, and Aaraon Swartz, the young co-founder of reddit found dead in his apartment on Friday, is yet another casualty in that conflict.

To some degree this post is one of those tangential “I was there” articles that come up when some tragedy occurs. I was working on my Library Science masters degree in Boston, and had a staff position as the Stacks Manager for the Architecture and Urban Planning library at MIT, when Aaron hacked us for a bunch of JSTOR articles. At the time the MIT libraries community seemed amused, and the vendor was satisfied when he turned the files over to them.

The Department of Justice, however, went on to press charges. With an attitude characterized by some as a witch hunt, they sustained pressure on Aaron Swartz for what amounted to exploiting a loophole to check out too many books. They continued until, just this past Friday, a truly great man took his life under the relentless threat of decades in prison.

Why call Aaron Swartz a great man? Among many other accomplishments, he helped invent the RSS protocol that brings you this blog, and updates many of your favorite websites. He, as mentioned above, helped found reddit.com, "the front page to the internet," a site that even the President of the United States uses. Aaron worked on the Creative Commons License that lets people freely share their artistic work while keeping their ownership of it. He also founded Demand Progress, which galvanized the public to demand the defeat of SOPA/PIPA, which would have hobbled how we share content on the internet.

He also was a huge ally of libraries, someone who really got what we’re about. Aaron was a founding force behind open access online library, Openlibrary.org. One that sought to have a wiki page for every book, and share its data with anyone in the world. And he fought against the great paywall database vendors put up to keep information out of the hands of the people who can use it, in favor of those who can pay for it.

Information wants to be free, because it’s the nature of people to share. It also want to be expensive because individuals can make resources valuable by keeping them scarce. But you can help break that tension. If you are in the position to publish your research, think about making it available in an Open Access forum or under a Creative Commons license. There is a wide community of scholars who could benefit from your ideas, but who may not be able to access them otherwise.

Blackout Today - SOPA, PIPA

Wikipedia and other websites are conducting a blackout today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Find out more about these two anti-piracy bills being considered by Congress. More information about these bills is available from the Legislative Panel of the Maryland Library Association.