By David DormanAmerican Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois.
Column for November 1999
The second annual Electronic Book Conference, sponsored and hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, was held in Gaithersburg, Maryland, September 21–22. Among the 600 attendees were several dozen representatives from the library community. The 33 presentations that were given during Electronic Book ’99 provided a good perspective on the current state of the e-book industry and illuminated many of the issues important to librarians.
Many librarians have expressed concern that digital books will ultimately make libraries unnecessary. On this score, I believe there’s little to fear. Content will always come at a cost. The people who are trying to facilitate electronic distribution of that content must create added value for the user to justify their role as electronic distributors; these new services may consume most, if not all, of the savings gained from not having to print, store, and move paper around. People will continue to need libraries to afford access to content.
While the e-book conference gave me the sense that this emerging industry wants to avoid a replay of the Betamax-versus-VHS war, I also got the impression that e-book vendors are salivating at the prospect of being able to sell content over and over again to the same customer as the format changes, as music publishers have been doing for the last 50 years with sound recordings. If this pattern repeats itself with books, libraries could wind up using a significant portion of their materials budgets repurchasing works already owned in an “antiquated” format.
The e-book industry does not speak of preservation; instead they call for “access in perpetuity.” But after listening to dozens of vendor presentations, it became crystal clear that publishers and distributors of content are not concerning themselves with preservation as librarians understand that term. They view access in perpetuity as a legal issue that is solved when the buyer is given the right to have access without time limits. That the right to access may have little practical meaning as formats become obsolete and digital content can no longer be accessed by current hardware and software is of no concern to most of them. After all, they have already made their sale.
The preservation issue has many complex facets, many of which cannot be solved by market arrangements between libraries and content providers. But one vital prerequisite—a standard distribution format—is under the control of content providers. Version 1.0 of the Open E-Book (OEB) standard was formally announced by NIST at Electronic Book ’99. Although the ability to purchase content in this XML-formatted standard does not guarantee a library that it can preserve that content, it does establish a firm foundation on which preservation strategies can be pursued.
If I were asked to name the catch phrase of the day, based on talk at the Electronic Book ’99 Conference, I would reply with “DRM,” or Digital Rights Management. The next big standards push will likely be the development of standard ways to transfer rights information among systems. From the vendors’ point of view, this is what is needed to create a mass market. From the libraries’ point of view, the implementation of DRM will make possible new arrangements to pay for access to content—from complete ownership to short-term leasing, and various combinations in between.
A related term I first encountered at the conference is “superdistribution.” This refers to the ability to distribute copies of e-texts ubiquitously while at the same time being able to prevent the recipients from viewing the e-text without first paying for it. It is DRM that will make super distribution possible. Spam will take on a whole new level of functionality.
This brings us to one final issue: the usefulness of the electronic readers themselves. The issues of readability and portability still loom large for libraries and their users. In the past year it has become clear that the size and weight of digital readers will not be a concern much longer. The real sticking points are durability, battery life, and above all, readability. No one doubts that in the long run, digital readers will be commonly used in lieu of newspapers, magazines, and books; however, for the next decade or so, printed materials will not be easily displaced. Computer displays are not nearly as effortless for most people to read as is the printed page. The act of truly emersive reading will not be possible for most readers using electronic screens for quite a few more years. Gradually, though, the devices will improve in every respect, and their use will soon proliferate for many kinds of printed material such as training manuals, textbooks, reference books, magazines, and newspapers.
Libraries would do well to begin experimenting with the e-book systems that exist in the marketplace, because this market is not going away. We all need to learn firsthand how to use this new medium—both to serve our users and to identify the services, formats, and property-rights arrangements that will meet library needs—so that we can communicate those needs to the emerging e-book vendor community.
For a generation of librarians the MARC format has been a pillar of the profession, but I predict it will soon become as out-of-place in the emerging universal computing environment as a Baroque balustrade on a Bauhaus balcony. Led by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the entire computing industry is moving to embrace the eXtensible Markup Language, or XML. This move to XML is a continuation of the trend that swept us all into an HTML universe.
For those of us who have grown accustomed to the arcane nomenclature of numeric fields and their corresponding indicators and subfields, MARC has become almost synonymous with AACR2 cataloging rules. But when all is said and done, MARC is really nothing but a particular way of precisely marking up a catalog record. And because it is unique to libraries, only library vendors have bothered to develop tools to use MARC.
But XML is not only a much more powerful and flexible markup language than MARC; it is also on the way to being adopted by every major software company that manipulates text—from database managers such as Oracle and Sybase to word processors such as Microsoft Word and WordPerfect. In a few years XML tools will be an integral part of all software that manipulates text. It will not only replace MARC, but it will replace every other non-XML metadata syntax, including such library-related ones as EDI.
The transition from MARC to XML will be both more trivial and more profound than we might at first glance imagine. Here is a book title marked up in two ways:
245 04 The Sot-Weed Factor
<title> <nonfile> The </nonfile>
Sot-Weed Factor </title>
The first line uses the USMARC metadata syntax. The second line uses the XML syntax. In the end, each does the job of denoting a title and indicating how it should be indexed. The real meat of the matter—the title and how it gets indexed—does not change; only the way this is noted changes. In this sense the transition will be trivial: AACR2 cataloging will remain AACR2 cataloging, regardless of the computer-readable syntax used to encode a cataloging record.
But in another sense, the transition will be profound. MARC represents the distinctiveness of librarianship, its principles and practices. XML represents the merging of the principles and practices of librarianship with the larger world of information processing and retrieval. The boundaries of our profession are changing and the fading of the MARC format will be part of that change.
Sun Microsystems announced the Sun Ray I Enterprise Appliance on September 8, but the Electronic Information Network (EIN), which supports the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the Allegheny County Library Association, had already been testing the new desktop device since July. They liked the appliance so much that after only a few weeks of testing they decided to immediately replace 200 of the systems’ 1,200 PCs with them: 70 for the Pittsburgh site and an additional 130 at 12 other large sites.
“The object was to improve the total cost of ownership,” said EIN Director Elbie Yaworsky. “The total capital purchase—appliance and server—is comparable to the cost of PCs. The real savings is in less time, dollars, and staff devoted to maintenance, software licensing, hardware upgrades, and management.” An added bonus, explained Yaworsky, is that obsolescence at the desktop is no longer an issue because the latest software upgrades for the Sun Ray can be downloaded from the Sun server. “No more memory, CPU, and software PC upgrades,” he declared.
The full functionality of a PC is not often required in public-access workstations. A browser-based catalog, external databases, and general Internet searching comprise 90% of all use of EIN public-access PCs in the 70 Allegheny County library sites. As for performance, the Sun Rays are significantly faster than the existing PCs. The major investment required by each individual library site is the upgrade to 100MB Ethernet to support the high-speed communication that takes place between the appliances and the servers.
The Sun Rays cost $500 each and require one server, at a cost of $5,000, for every 10 Sun Rays. For more information on the EIN’s successful use of Sun Ray I Enterprise Appliances, contact Elbie Yaworksy.