The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship June 2010 Council on Library and Information Resources Washington, D.C. ISBN 978-1-932326-35-2 CLIR Publication No. 147 Published by: Council on Library and Information Resources 1752 N Street, NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 Web site at http://www.clir.org Additional copies are available for $25 each. Orders must be placed through CLIR’s Web site. This publication is also available online at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub147abst.html. The paper in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ANSI Z39.48-1984. Copyright 2010 by the Council on Library and Information Resources. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transcribed in any form without permission of the publisher. Requests for reproduction or other uses or questions pertaining to permissions should be submitted in writing to the Director of Communications at the Council on Library and Information Resources. Cover image: Copyright 2010 Michael Morgenstern c/o theispot.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The idea of order : transforming research collections for 21st century scholarship. p. cm. -- (CLIR publication ; no. 147) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-932326-35-2 (alk. paper) 1. Research libraries--Forecasting. 2. Research libraries--Collection development. 3. Libraries--Special collections--Electronic information resources. 4. Research libraries--Book collections--Conservation and restoration. 5. Library materials--Digitization. 6. Scholarly electronic publishing. 7. Digital libraries. 8. Information commons. 9. Libraries and scholars. 10. Libraries and electronic publishing. I. Council on Library and Information Resources. II. Title. III. Series. Z675.R45I34 2010 027.7--dc22 2010022593 iii Contents About the Authors . iv Acknowledgments . v The Idea of Order by Charles Henry . 1 Can a New Research Library Be All-Digital? by Lisa Spiro and Geneva Henry . 5 On the Cost of Keeping a Book by Paul N. Courant and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen . 81 Ghostlier Demarcations: Large-Scale Text-Digitization Projects and Their Utility for Contemporary Humanities Scholarship by Charles Henry and Kathlin Smith . 106 Conclusion by Roger C. Schonfeld . 116 Epilogue by Charles Henry . 121 Note: Full results of commissioned research on scholarly use of digital texts created through large-scale scanning projects, which are summarized in “Ghostlier Demarca- tions,” are available online at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub147.html. iv About the Authors Paul N. Courant is university librarian and dean of libraries, Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and professor of economics and of information at the University of Michigan. He has also served as provost and executive vice president for academic af- fairs at Michigan. He has published on a broad range of topics in economics and public policy, including tax policy, state and local economic development, gender differences in pay, housing, radon and public health, relationships be- tween economic growth and environmental policy, and university budgeting systems. More recently, he is studying the economics of universities, the eco- nomics of libraries and archives, and the changes in the system of scholarly communication that derive from new information technologies. Charles Henry is president of the Council on Library and Information Resources. Before his appointment early in 2007, he was vice provost and university librarian at Rice University, where he was responsible for library services and programs, including the Digital Library Initiative and the Digital Media Center. Mr. Henry is also publisher of Rice University Press, which was reborn in 2006 as the nation’s first all-digital university press. Geneva Henry is executive director of Rice University’s Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS). The CDS supports digital scholarship projects at Rice and is home to the Digital Media Center, which provides multimedia equip- ment, services, and training to the campus to support the creation of rich media projects and scholarship. In 2006, Ms. Henry was a distinguished fel- low with the Digital Library Federation, working with the Abstract Services Framework Working Group to develop a framework of digital library servic- es. From March 2002 through June 2005 she served as executive director for the Connexions project, helping shape and launch the project. Prior to joining Rice, Ms. Henry was a senior information technology architect and program manager with IBM, where she was involved in several complex systems pro- grams for government agencies, universities, and museums worldwide. Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen is assistant director at the North Bend Public Library in Oregon. His first library job 15 years ago was at the Langlois Public Library in Oregon, which serves a community smaller than most people’s high school graduating classes. Currently, his interests include rural library development, library economics, nonprofit law and policy, and promotion of open source software in governments and nonprofits. Roger C. Schonfeld leads the research efforts at Ithaka S+R. His work has focused on shifts in faculty attitudes and research practices in an increas- ingly electronic environment; shifts in teaching practices and the future of v instruction; and the academic library in a digital environment, including the economics, preservation, and policy issues associated with the transi- tion from print to electronic formats for scholarly literature and government documents. He has served on the NSF Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, and on the Western Regional Storage Trust’s advisory committee. Previously, Roger was a research associate at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. There, he wrote JSTOR: A History (Princeton University Press, 2003), which examines business models for the shift to an online environment for scholarly texts by focusing on how JSTOR developed into a self-sustaining not-for-profit organization. Kathlin Smith is director of communications at the Council on Library and Information Resources where, over the past decade, she has coordinated the publication of more than 80 reports. She also edits and writes for the bi- monthly CLIR Issues newsletter. Lisa Spiro directs Rice University’s Digital Media Center, where she helps plan and manage digital projects, studies the impact of information technol- ogy on higher education, and oversees a multimedia lab. She created the Learning Science and Technology Repository, founded the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki, and served as coprincipal investigator of the Travelers in the Middle East Archive. A Frye Leadership Institute fellow, Ms. Spiro has published and presented on a range of topics, including the history of read- ing and publishing in nineteenth-century America, the impact of electronic resources on humanities scholarship, and text encoding. Her blog, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, is at http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/. Acknowledgments CLIR would like to thank Alice Bishop, Charles Clotfelter, Amy Friedlander, David Gift, Michael Ann Holly, Clifford Lynch, Michael McPherson, Carole Moore, Stephen Nichols, and James Williams for reviewing and providing comments on the essays in this volume; and Leslie Eagle, Linda Harteker, and Brian Leney for their superb help in manuscript preparation. We also thank James O’Donnell for serving as coprincipal investigator on the project to ex- amine large-scale text digitization projects and their use in contemporary hu- manities scholarship, and Jonathan Culler, Helen Cullyer, Anthony Grafton, Rick Luce, Stephen Nichols, Eleonore Stump, Will Thomas, Nancy Vickers, and Steven Wheatley for contributing to the discussion. Finally, we thank The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for supporting the evaluation and analysis of large-scale text digitization projects. vi 1 The Idea of Order Charles Henry “ he general aim is to piece together a new ‘epistemic self-por- trait’: that is, a fresh account of the capacities, processes, and Tactivities, in virtue of which Man acquires an understanding of Nature, and Nature in turn becomes intelligible to Man.” Thus, in 1972 Stephen Toulmin laid out his complex goal in Human Under- standing: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. In writing his book, Toulmin broke with the long tradition of Cartesian reasoning that strove to explicate human understanding in terms that described a set of concepts that were universally shared, immutable, and abstracted from the world around us. Toulmin re- jects this approach and grounds his exploration of how concepts are shared, generation to generation, and how they may mutate in the process, by studying the influences of sociohistorical processes and intellectual procedures on collective understanding; by comparing historical and cultural contexts of various positions; and by includ- ing recent discoveries in psychological and physiological research that have focused on how the brain acquires and retains knowledge. His emphasis on scientific concepts in this regard stands as a lesser- known alternative to Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, though Toulmin also explored concept formation and evolution in engineering and the applied sciences. The first important aspect of Toulmin’s work is its groundbreak- ing,