Issue 10: Spring 2008
Interview with Chuck Hamaker, Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services at Atkins Library - University of North Carolina Charlotte
Arend Küster Director PCG Europe and Emilie Delquié Head of ResearchWith Deana Astle, Chuck Hamaker was a recipient of the Bowker Ulrich Serials Librarian award in 1991 and with Jane Kleiner the recipient of the K.G. Saur Best article of the year award in College and Research Libraries in 1998. He has primarily focused on serials, their cost, and management.
He has worked at a number of libraries, including Brigham Young University, Yale's Latin American Collection, the University of Missouri St. Louis, Louisiana State University and currently the University of North Carolina Charlotte. He is also senior editor and editorial advisor for the Charleston Advisor.
Emilie Delquié: Could you tell us about your experience with e-books in your library and how you’ve been dealing with them over the last several years?
Chuck Hamaker: We have a couple of ways of getting e-books. The state of North Carolina has purchased some NetLibrary e-books and those all have records in our library catalogue. That’s about 20,000. In addition, we subscribe to ENGNetBASE which is a Taylor and Francis CRC Press database of primarily engineering books. Other than that, we really haven’t done much with e-books. There have been a number of reasons for that: one is that our IT department - not the library - pays for SkillPort [Note: a learning management system and the university’s 24/7 online training solution for Faculty, Staff, and Students] for Books24x7. We do full cataloging for NetLibrary and ENGNetBASE, but not for Books24x7 because of technical problems.
ED: Is this something you would like to do?
CH: Yes, but the technical problems are pretty severe, though Books 24x7 does offer IP filtered access for an additional price. But in the system we have for example, I tried to log on last Monday, and before I could, the system checked mine to see if I was compatible with theirs. I happen to have Microsoft Windows 2000 and Firefox, which were fine. Adobe Flash version 9.0 and the Java virtual machine version 5.0 update 10 were not fully qualified. It also didn’t like my pop up blockers. For three different reasons I couldn’t get in. I have noticed that other librarians have talked about these same types of issues with other systems. I don’t want to be picking on Books24x7 I think they have great content, but other systems have requirements that are also very specific.
For Blackwell’s ECHO platform you need a special reader to use it. They are addressing this I understand. But specialized software is a substantial problem when you’ve got to have special software or treat your own software differently (such as the pop up blocker). This has major implications for the use of e-books: if people can’t get to them, there isn’t much we can do.
ED: So you would have to install the software on all the computers in the library?
CH: Absolutely.
Arend Küster: With digital rights management systems being relatively new, publishers hope for compatibility with at least windows XP or even further than that.
CH: I think you’re right and many of them are looking for java based applications. Who knows what version of java applications software I’m going to have to have available on my computer? Until they figure out how to standardize across all these different platforms, getting people to the content can be a nightmare. I gave up on Books24x7. I might have been willing to take care of one of these problems, but three different ones?
ED: During a recent survey we just conducted, we found that 40% of the librarians didn’t anticipate a change in their expense for e-books in the next year or so. What is the situation in your library?
CH: I think we would like to spend more on e-books, but the reality is that they’re difficult to use. I think there’s a great deal of pent-up demand for these things if they were just simply usable and easy to navigate, but they’re not.
In addition, you have problems with license agreements. I know that there are a couple of ways around that. Blackwell with their ECHO product has a standard license approach, which should make things easier. Right now, I’m working with Oxford on Oxford Digital Reference Shelf and I’ve got to negotiate points about three different aspects of that contract before I can accept it. They knew the minute they sent it to me that it wasn’t acceptable. For example, it has a venue clause which says that I agree to be sued in the state of Florida. I think the interest level is very high for this type of product, but the practical problems are creating barriers.
ED: Do you have other examples of clauses in the license agreements that have slowed you down?
CH: I’ve never signed some platforms’ agreements because they are just simply too complicated to work through. The most recent one that seems to be cropping up is a hold harmless clause in various contracts. They want me to agree up front to reimburse them for certain legal costs. I can’t sign any contract like that, so I have to negotiate it out before I can accept it. Almost every contract that I’ve seen has a “gotcha” clause in it. It seems like they’ve got lawyers writing these who don’t know much about how libraries work, or how we fit in institutions.
No one in the state of North Carolina can agree to venue problems, can’t agree to hold harmless clauses. The whole state gets impacted by a couple of pretty simple clauses that shouldn’t be in the contracts in the first place. People are getting more concerned because of the Georgia State Lawsuit, so these contracts and licenses get even more scrutiny.
The Oxford Digital Reference license covers electronic reserves and course packs. I have to follow the contract negotiation guidelines from my office of legal counsel that includes 45 questions. That may be extreme but every one of the points made has to be checked off and clarified before we can sign a license. I find myself spending enormous amounts of time on license agreements. As far as I can tell, the people with the book platforms haven’t learned very much from the rest of the industry about license agreements.
AK: Do you find that the license agreements for e-books are very different to the ones for serials?
CH: Yes and they are tougher. They have more “gotcha” clauses in them. It’s truly bizarre.
AK: Maybe when we look at the very first ejournal agreements, they were tougher as well and softened up with experience. Maybe there is a cycle which we have to go through with the e-books as well.
CH: I think you’re right. It seems that we’re going through the whole cycle that we went through with journals: the proprietary search systems and the proprietary download systems. Journal publishers tried to force us to go to their websites in order to do searches. I think that book publishers haven’t figured out how to offer a standard platform and a standard set of software that has to be available to make their products usable. They’re each discovering it themselves and it is a problem.
ED: Aside from the license agreement, what features are key for you in an e-book platform?
CH: There are still a lot of features that could be incorporated but aren’t yet. One simple example is access at the chapter level from outside of the publishers system. I can put the table of content’s information into my library catalogue for an e-book and the URL at that level for the specific chapter, but most of these e-book systems - with a couple of exceptions - aren’t built to let me link to the chapter level. NetLibrary says point blank, “No, you can’t do that.” It’s because of the way they’ve configured their system, which basically gives the whole PDF for access externally. The kinds of things that you can do within the books aren’t getting done from my perspective because of this lack of flexibility.
They seem to be too afraid. If we get to the point where we have enough e-books that faculty want to use the specific chapters for reserves, or to link within Blackboard for example, what are we going to do? In the print environment it would mean that the pages have to be scanned and set on a server with a simple url to go to that chapter behind a firewall (and with appropriate permissions or within fair use guidelines). Why should we have to do that in the e-book environment? Why would you create a system like that where we know already that faculty like to use chapters from books for reserve and for course readings? Making ILL copy an electronic article in order to use it is one thing, forcing institutions to do the same thing is something else especially when they are trying to use e-content legally.
Publishers are beginning to enhance textbooks, with regards to other digital content such as music and video embedded but right now that is not part of what’s happening with standard books.
AK: I look at e-books as collections of articles published.
CH: Particularly for scholarly monographs. For many of them, individual chapters stand alone.
AK: I just wonder what sort of pricing models you find acceptable and which ones you find too restrictive.
CH: It depends on the type of book and the likely use for it. Textbooks are a special case and have to be handled differently. There are many books that aren’t quite at the textbook level, where some of the content has course relevance. Theoretically everything we buy has some relevance to a course being taught on campus to support the teaching and research here. Publishers or vendors providing this material have to be prepared to support that kind of use. I don’t think they consider that in developing the models that are out there right now.
What we’re seeing so far is strange pricing: without a relationship to the usage models that might be appropriate. There are monographs where only one person on campus could possibly want to read it and others where it’s very clear that content is such that they’re going to be used to support major reading requirements. I don’t have a problem with paying differential based on usage forecasts or based on actual usage: such as taking it for a year and figuring out after the year the usage pattern.
ED: Do you have a preference between one time purchases and subscription models?
CH: We use a subscription model for the engineering texts that are owned by Taylor & Francis CRC Press and it works fairly well. For other types of content, I don’t want a subscription model. For most of the output of Oxford, Cambridge, Yale or Harvard, it’s so specialized that the subscription model doesn’t make any sense. I actually do want to buy that one item and have some type of ownership for it over time. I may have to pay some type of fee to maintain access on top of the pricing and that seems a reasonable model. I don’t think they’ve experimented enough yet to know.
ED: If you were to subscribe to or purchase a book in electronic format, how likely would you be to have it in print as well?
CH: It depends on whether we get to a point where we have a usable platform. We still have instances where the electronic journal doesn’t work and the demand is so high that we have to keep the print. Science and Nature are examples where the electronic journal doesn’t substitute for the print yet. Whereas for most of Elsevier journals, it’s a perfect substitute because they don’t have all of that other content and they don’t have the immediacy factor of a weekly subscription.
I suspect that that’s true for books too. In fact I know there are cases, where my institution has to have the physical book because of institutional responsibility for a subject area for instance. I suspect that in the Humanities for at least the next 10 to 15 years, if a faculty member has a book published, they’re going to want that physical book as well as electronic access. Poetry is an example: if you sell me the book electronically, I think I still have to have a print copy of the poetry.
ED: Could you comment on which subject areas you see move faster in the e-book direction than others, or you wish moved faster than others?
CH: I need local history in print, and electronically as an example and this will be the case for a long time. On some types of books, clinical nursing for instance, I need the electronic and need it fast. Three years from now we will need to wipe the electronic and get another edition. In fact I throw the print away after three years in clinical nursing. Other institutions don’t, but we do because the accrediting bodies require for clinical collection that we only have the most current available.
Engineering is really mixed. There are some engineering titles that have a shelf life of 20 or 30 years. Civil engineering is an area where the shelf life just goes on forever. I’ve seen civil engineering titles that are 40 years old still circulating. Whereas there are other areas in engineering where content is considered old after 5 years or less. In these cases, the electronic makes more sense where the information is going to go out of date pretty quickly.
ED: What is your institution’s experience with acquiring frontlist vs. backlist?
CH: I don’t think I have enough experience yet to know the answer to that question. We had this last semester a book that is out of print that’s being used. It’s on reserve, and we don’t know how long it’s going to survive. I would love to have it: it’s a 30 year old book in history. I’d love to be able to buy that electronically. I know that there’s some backlist titles that I need but that they’re not being kept in print. On the other hand, for some subject areas, I need the frontlist and I need it very quickly.
ED: Where do you see e-books collections in five years?
CH: Well, I’d like to be an optimist but I don’t see the publishers and the platforms correcting the basic problems. These aren’t new issues. I’ve been talking about many of them, for a number of years and so have other people. We don’t seem to be able to get across to publishers that they have to solve compatibility issues. They have to solve licensing issues and they have to solve pricing issues. I haven’t seen much movement in the last three years. I’ve seen more platforms which have exacerbated the problem of access.
I don’t know where we’re at in five years. One of the problems is I don’t see book publishers working with NISO for example on the level that journal publishers did to get the open URL standard accepted. As far as I can tell, book publishers are ignoring the open URL and to a large extent, NISO. Well, that’s at their own peril.
AK: Some traditional trade publishers are not catering for the library community as well.
CH: NISO is a perfect place where book publishers ought to be talking about standards across these systems. I’ve talked with book publishers and they aren’t well represented in NISO.
AK: When you mentioned that quote in Against the Grain “I hope somebody would figure out the e-books riddle in this year” that probably is to summarize: technical requirements, licensing requirements, and pricing.
CH: Yes, I think you’re right. .
ED: Do you feel that there is enough demand to justify closer dialogue between publishers and the library community?
CH: I think there’s a huge pent-up demand. I think that talking about this year or five years from now, if publishers can get their act together I think there’s a huge wave of libraries ready and willing to move to electronic books, but we don’t have the foundational pieces in place yet. I think libraries are more ready than publishers are for electronic books. We’d be willing to put our money, I think, into them if they were only usable and stable and more user-friendly. This is a market that I would say, if the publishers and platform vendors can get their act together, is sitting waiting to take off in a major way.
AK: It’s been waiting to take off for the last two years and there is an opportunity to learn from past experience.
ED: Do you hear any concerns or resistance from your patrons about the ease of reading a book online?
CH: I don’t think it’s an issue for the students we have right now. Where it is an issue, we just simply buy the print more.
ED: What features would be important for you to have with any e-book offering?
CH: We need something like a counter (Project COUNTER) for e-books and we need deep linking. I know they’re working on it. They have to get over their fear that somehow somebody is going to steal a whole book and send it out to the whole world. It’s just unreasonable when you look at the types of restrictions they’re putting on printing from an e-book, that’s silly. They don’t have any evidence of e-books being stolen. The DRM systems that they’re using actually are making the books less usable.
ED: In terms of your cataloging, do you have any requirements that would make a platform or e-books easier to integrate?
CH: When it comes to electronic packaging of journals, we rely very heavily on third party sources for our cataloging. At least while we’re talking about bulk purchases that would be a major concern in e-books as well. We have good solid sources to do third party cataloging: we don’t need to reinvent the wheel in every library.
AK: Did you have any additional comments to make?
CH: The opportunity I think is just sitting there waiting. I think there’s a huge market. The library market is usually the first market to accept new things. Publishers are not paying attention. If they figure out how to do the library market right, they’re going to have more experience ready to serve the individual customer. I’ll be real interested in seeing what you come up with
Chuck Hamaker, thank you so much for your feedback and for taking the time to talk to us.