Unpacking “free”
I read through the OCLC report on library branding finally; it did take me a while. It didn’t answer the question I posed earlier; it didn’t interrogate the importance of books relative to other media in respondents’ lives, so it really doesn’t tell us how happy or un- we ought to be about the book brand.
Be that as it may, the book brand isn’t the first thing that jumped out at me begging to be commented on. The several questions about “free information” did, because I don’t think those are useful questions to ask.
What does “free” mean to the average information-seeker? I would argue that it means free to them at point of contact. It doesn’t mean produced for free. It doesn’t mean “not paid for by anybody.” It certainly doesn’t mean Creative-Commonsed or Free Documentation Licenced or open-accessed or self-archived. It means that they can read it without opening their wallet. Period.
Under that definition, why on $DEITY’s green earth should the average information-seeker not seek out and trust free information as much as paid? There’s a metric ton of information out there, trustworthy and usable information, that is free in this sense—everything in libraries being a not-unworthy portion of that information. Patrons don’t sort out the upper reaches of the payment chain, and why should they? (If you sense that I’m frustrated with faculty obtuseness as regards their role in the broken scholarly-communication system, you are not wrong.)
This says to me that libraries aren’t going to make any progress in patron mindshare with the free-vs.-paid-for distinction. This really, truly shouldn’t be news to anybody; we’ve been flogging this distinction for ages, and we’ve gotten noplace.
So what horse is still alive for further flogging?
I would want to trial-balloon a “Deep Web” play in my next survey, if I were OCLC. I would want to know how many people have heard of the Deep Web, what they think is in it, whether they think information useful to them is in it, whether they would access it through their libraries if they could. This moves away from free-vs.-paid and toward exclusive-vs.-nonexclusive. People like the idea of being privileged. If the library is a place that privileges them, I think they’ll go for it. Special-collections and archives get a boost in this campaign, too; access to rare or unique information is the ultimate in privilege.
Nota bene, this isn’t a permanent strategy either. (Is any strategy permanent?) As libraries move toward becoming publishers, the ratio of exclusive to non-exclusive information will tip toward the latter. How long until the tip is definitive? I have no idea, and I work in that area! It may not be in my lifetime. I can’t imagine it happening in less than ten years. But I do believe that over time, the shift will be from buying (and doling out access to) information to producing it (in the text-artisan sense) and then sifting it intelligently and profitably.
Still, as a stopgap, the Deep Web might be a useful battle standard.
I was neither surprised nor amused by the complete miss-in-baulk given to electronic library resources by patrons. Your standard, garden-variety librarian started out with a smoldering (and by no means unjustified) hatred for these things, and embers of that hatred remain. E-resources are not promoted. Librarians often do not model their use during reference interactions. Public-library web sites do not call attention to them, never mind providing access to them outside library walls. So of course patrons don’t know they’re there. Add that to the generally abysmal state of e-resource user-interfaces, never mind those of library websites, and you have a spicy stew of zero usage. Who’s surprised? Not me.
(I have a rant brewing about library websites, because my public library’s website is so unbelievably horrible—it takes THREE CLICKS to get to the OPAC search, minimum!—that I swear I would redo it myself for free just so it wouldn’t annoy me so badly. But this is a rant for another day.)
Point being, we’ve shot ourselves in the foot with our lingering loathing of e-resources, and we’d better poultice ourselves fast. We have stuff that can compete with Google well enough for our purposes; we are the public face of the Deep Web. We’re just plain not connecting patrons with it. We can’t blame that on patrons. It’s on us.