The Challenges of Technology and Corporate Power in the Library
Creating a sustainability plan for your library is important. Without changes at the library level, we cannot have changes at the level of the information system as whole. To build a whole new kind of library system though, we need to confront the problems in the information system directly, as an organized profession. Without confronting power directly, we cannot be successful. It is the difference between recycling and the passing of the Clean Water Act. Recycling is popular in large part because it threatens no one while creating an industry of its own—one with a powerful constituency of corporate actors who can advocate for themselves and encourage citizens to use their services. No one loses out; there is no shortage of garbage causing landfill companies to go out business. Instead, it can be a win-win situation. Like with most of the library sustainability efforts suggested in previous chapters, recycling makes people feel good, makes other people money, and creates very little resistance among those who currently hold power because it threatens no one. Passing and enforcing the Clean Water Act, in contrast, was and is far more challenging. It costs a considerable amount of money both for taxpayers and for companies. It is constantly being questioned, ignored, and fought directly by those whose behavior it restricts, while very few people visit their local waterway and think, “Wow this would be even more polluted if not for the Clean Water Act!” And yet, it is the Clean Water Act and not recycling that has arguably been the larger benefit to the environment over the past 30 years. A library sustainability plan is like recycling. We should all do it, it is important, but it will never lead to the kind of changes needed on its own. For that, we need a Clean Water Act. The library equivalent of the Clean Water Act is what the next two chapters describe. But before we can get there, we need to lay out clearly why we need change and what needs to change.
The Actualization of the Digital Library
The great library educator and philosopher Jesse Shera once wrote, “We could have in this whole new information science something as potentially dangerous as the atomic bomb.”1 Likely, he had no idea how very true his words were, though not in the way he expected. His claim hinged on the idea that expansive changes in technology—the computer, the microform, and various other gadgets—required the profession to transform itself so that new technologies could be used well and controlled by those who had the best interest of the public at heart. Part of that, in his view, was keeping them in the right hands, with those who would not use these new technologies for “anti-social” purposes. As he wrote, “We simply have to establish safeguards, social and political safeguards so that these mechanical advances are used for the proper ends, and so not fall into the wrong hands, that they are not misused.”2 From the perspective of the 21st century, his comments seem both quaint and antiquated. The idea that it might be possible to keep a technology out of the wrong hands and so ensure that it is used for prosocial purposes is no longer reasonable; we have decades of experience and billions of dollars wasted in pointless wars that underscore that fact. Whether it is keeping nuclear weapons away from countries the United States believes dangerous or keeping Google in hands that live up to the motto “don’t be evil,” time has shown that once a technology exists it will be used badly, for corporate gain or for national power, by those who seek to turn it into a weapon of war or commerce.
Jesse Shera lived through an era—his professional career spanned the 1930s through the 1970s—that was perhaps even more subject to life-altering change than our own, including the almost universal adoption of the automobile, universal access to electricity, to the beginnings of what we now call the information revolution. His was an era of justified optimism peppered with strong social movements that improved life for the far better for most Americans. As far back as 1967 he pointed out, “For generations, the scholar has dreamed of a utopia in which he would have access to the total store of materials and the ability to choose from it only the best documents for his immediate need.”3 We now live in a version of that utopia, or at least some of us do. The technical challenges of the so-called “library problem” have been solved by and large, and solved well. There is no technological reason that almost everybody in the United States cannot walk into their local public library, locate, and retrieve, or request via interlibrary loan, almost any document or book they wish to read. And there is no technological reason that anyone with access to the internet cannot use a search engine and gain access to the wide bulk of medical, scholarly, and scientific literature. The problem, which Shera hints at in his writings but never confronts directly, is that within our society technology is always the tool of the powerful, and the more powerful the technology, the truer this is. And the more libraries rely on that technology to do our daily work and fulfill our missions, the more vulnerable we have become to those in power.
It is here, at the intersection of power and technology within the library that we find the greatest challenge to contemporary librarianship. It did not have to be this way. In 1998, Jean-Claude Guédon outlined what he called the “virtual library.”4 Guédon’s virtual library was a utopian vision, and a warning. The ongoing increases in the price of journals, the massive transition to electronic publishing, and the transformation of the scholarly journal economy into a market economy were well under way. Guédon warned, “Libraries remain our very best hope to prevent basic human knowledge from being completely privatized, monopolized, and ultimately locked up by venal interests. Librarians must never forget that point and scholars should quickly come to assist as they recognize that librarians are their best ramparts against a commercial ethos that may undermine their intellectual and individual integrity.”5 Guédon’s vision for the future was one where libraries had built the safeguards that Shera called for; it was one where libraries made the transition from collectors to publishers, one where libraries had taken a central role in the production and dissemination of knowledge itself. It was a vision where the knowledge bounty that technology allows was used to the benefit of all, instead of locked behind digital walls and converted into a commodity for profit.
From the perspective of 15 years later it is easy to see the open access movement as the direct descendant of this vision. But it is also easy to see that between attempts to co-opt the movement by publishers and the struggles libraries have with advocating for a new system, we have largely failed as a profession in realizing Guédon’s vision. While we have dithered and discussed new models, new ways of actualizing the potential of digital libraries, corporate interests have not. The actualization of the digital library has taken on a particular form, one that presents considerable danger to libraries and our readers. We have allowed commercial interests to claim “ownership” of the scholarly record through digitization and publishing. In doing so we have allowed an unhealthy system to grow. This system leads to libraries that have been hollowed out, reduced to access points with librarians as skilled product trainers, while the publishers themselves profit handsomely from the labor of the very scholars we support and from the citizens whose taxes support us all. It has led to a system where a scholarly article, one researched and written on the taxpayer and nonprofit dime, can be purchased on the web for $35 and hardly anyone seems to be angry enough to object beyond strongly written statements. That we have allowed this to happen is not surprising. Corporate interests have taken considerable power throughout the economy since the 1980s. But, as they say, another world is possible. What is does not have to be and by exploring the failure of the current system we can begin to see a path to a new information system. One rooted firmly in library values, serving us, our readers, and the larger world in which we all live. And most importantly, one that can withstand the challenges we are facing in the 21st century while making widely available the legacy of human knowledge that it is our profession’s duty to preserve and share.
It is important to distinguish here between the fact of digitized information, specifically the rather glorious product that is the contemporary database, and the political economy that this product has fostered. Or to quote Shera again, “Now, lest we be misunderstood, we want to emphasize. . . that we yield to no one in our enthusiasm for the computer and what its obvious power can bring to the library.”6 It warrants saying again that though the Luddites, both contemporary and historical, all have my most sincere sympathies and solidarity in their fight, I am not against technology nor am I advocating for a return to the long lost days of card catalogs and bound journals. Instead, like the original Luddites who were objecting not to the machines themselves, but rather to the changes in the economy that they fostered, so I am critiquing the political economy of knowledge. That economy has been enabled by technology and has developed simultaneously with the rather incredible advances of that technology, but it is distinct from it. What I am critiquing is the state of being that Estabrook predicted in response to Daniel Bell’s optimistic prediction that power in society would transition from the owners of capital to those who could control information. Estabrook’s rebuttal to Bell’s prediction, “It does not necessarily follow. . . that the ownership of capital will be replaced by the ownership of knowledge as the basis for societal power. Rather, it can be argued that, as information becomes more important, the owners of capital will appropriate the information utilities more directly for their purposes.”7 The problems that have arisen since Estabrook’s prediction in 1981, detailed below, are not inherent to computer based storage and retrieval of information, but are rather caused by the particular place, time, and social milieu in which the technology developed. It could have been otherwise and it can be otherwise.
The Digital Library and the Enclosure of the Information Ecosystem
The consolidation of the publishing industry into a few behemoths and the all encompassing nature of a webscale ILS surely would have taken Shera and his contemporaries by surprise. I suspect even Guédon is startled by the sheer scale of the current system. Librarians in Shera’s day did not foresee the extent to which the advent of high technology and its application to the “library problem” would lead to the old process of enclosure. Hence, a technological problem has been replaced with an economic problem with the result that the full utopia once imagined cannot come into being.
Enclosure is the process of taking a previously shared resource, a graz-ing field, a water source, or even information, and erecting barriers to use. The most well-known example of an enclosure movement is in the sheep grazing common of England in the Middle Ages. There first the nobles, and then eventually those who had been made wealthy through industrialization, began taking land that had previously been used by all members of a village for their own private use. The goal was to raise as many sheep as possible for the new mills being built in the cities. As a contemporary poem describes the process:
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
Anonymous8
The result of this process, whose utter brutality should not be overlooked, was indeed more wool and also the creation of the first urban industrial working class. As Karl Polanyi says in The Great Transformation, “Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor.”9 The current enclosure movement is no different.
But how do we move from the agricultural and budding industrial economy of England to the contemporary information economy? Vandana Shiva, in her book Earth Democracy, lays out a five-step process for enclosing a common, one that can be seen at work in the information economy as much as in the sheep grazing fields of old England.10 The first step she identifies is, “the exclusion of people from resources that had been their common property or held in common.” This process can be seen in biotechnology patents that allow seeds from particular plants to be turned into intellectual property so that they cannot be used without payment to their “owners,” in the patenting of biological processes, and in the continual extension of copyright terms at the expense of the public domain. From a library perspective, we can see this process most clearly in the scholarly journal economy. These articles are written for tenure, for prestige, to communicate an important advance and then they are then handed over to commercial publishers for distribution, largely back to libraries. The problem is that with the advent of digital technology and the internet publishers have chosen to charge enormous amounts of money to access these articles, thereby putting up digital fences and excluding a large part of the potential readership.
This leads to Shiva’s second step, “the creation of ‘surplus’ or ‘disposable’ people. . . .” These people, whom we see today most acutely in the unemployed scholar, the recent graduate, those not covered by a large and well-funded public library system, and most of all in the people of the global South, are now in a position of being denied access, not because of a lack of ability on our part to bring them the materials they need, but to preserve the profit of publishers and database companies. These are our ‘disposable’ people. A technological barrier has been replaced with an economic barrier. And like the landless peasants of England who starved among plenty, so too do our disposable people suffer. Lack of access to medical information for doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals is one serious consequence. They, along with their patients, qualify as “disposable” under our current information system. Consider the case of medical professionals in parts of Africa. In a descriptive study of the use of medical literature by postgraduate doctors and medical researchers by Smith et al., “Respondents frequently described locating an article of interest only to find that it needs a subscription.” They reported problems accessing articles for free even within so-called “free initiatives”; for example, “HINARI has a common password for this institution, but users are discouraged because they say at times some cost must be incurred if full text is requested.”11
Thirdly, Shiva identifies “the creating of private property by the enclosure of common property.” Continuing to examine the case of scholarly journals, in the pre-digital days a journal became part of the larger common that is a library collection. And the combined physical collections of the libraries of the United States have long been a genuine common built from the smaller common of individual libraries’ collections. From the early days of the National Catalog, interlibrary loan has been a thriving and important service offered by libraries. Union catalogs, and later services like RLN and OCLC, attest to the work the profession put into creating a system that could be shared broadly. The material was still covered under copyright, but the ability to read the item faced only the inherent restriction of physicality and the readers’ intellectual limits. It is easy to see though why earlier librarians were so eager to see at least the first restriction lifted. Physical items are inferior in many ways to digital items. With the proliferation of smart phones and e-readers, the wealth of human knowledge could realistically be made available to anyone with access to the Internet and a high level of literacy. There will likely always be the so-called “long tail,” but most of what people want to read and want to know could easily be made available. It is the transformation of that knowledge into private property, into an almost eternal source of profit for a small group of publishers, that has stood in the way. We can see this see in the idea that libraries should pay an ongoing, eternal toll for access to information that was previously owned outright, a toll far in excess of what it costs to maintain the servers and networks that support that access.
The next step in the enclosure process Shiva lays out is “the replacement of diversity that provides for multiple needs and performs functions with monocultures that provide raw materials for the market.” In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow, a history of scholarly publishing by Guédon, we see a strong proliferation of a wide variety of scholarly publishers in the early part of the last century.12 We see each learned society supporting its members with the publication of journals, we see some commercial participation, and we see most of all that the many disciplines and subdisciplines each had their own set of journals, published by a multiplicity of sources. Guédon cites the Science Citation Index as a key player in the identification of potentially valuable titles and the precipitating factor that led to the flood of commercial interest in scholarly publishing. Whether he is correct or not in his analysis of the cause, currently 42 percent of academic journals are controlled by three massive publishers.13 The diversity the scholarly publishing system previously benefited from has vanished, to be replaced by a few large multinational corporations reaping profits off the backs of an ever growing number of scholars and an ever shrinking pool of library resources.
Fifth, “The enclosure of minds and imagination with the result that enclosures are defined and perceived as universal human progress, not as growth of privilege and exclusive rights for a few and the dispossession and impoverishment for the many.” The large commercial publishers and library product vendors would have us believe that their outsized profits are due to them for their beneficence in creating the products we all rely on, for building the database and the integrated library system. They would also have us believe that the current system is the only one possible, that large commercial enterprises are the only method of providing access to digital information, despite the access challenges they present. They discourage us from thinking seriously about what a different system could look like, what other choices we could make as a profession to ensure that we fulfill our mission of universal access while not bankrupting ourselves. Alongside this effort, they are working their best to co-opt the open access movement and manipulate it for their benefit.14 They are successful in this because we allow them to be. When we speak in hushed tones when criticizing vendors, when we sign agreements that keep how much we pay for a product secret, when we allow ourselves to be silenced in our criticism because it feels unseemly, we are complicit in their attempts to stifle our creativity and willingness to fight for our patrons.
The Enclosed Digital Library and the Individual Library
The impact that this perverse information system has on individual libraries is profound. From a larger perspective the system is one manifestation of the ongoing attempts to defund the public sector to the benefit of the commercial sector, similar to attempts to promote charter schools over public schools and high stakes tests provided by corporations who market curriculums to match. The impact of this program on libraries has been a hollowing out of our basic functions as we are converted into a conduit to send money to large corporations on the one hand and to send patrons to their products on the other. The term for this, first coined by Schiller in his work on the commercialization of culture, Culture, Inc. is library bypass strategies.15 In 1989, when Schiller was writing, he envisioned products being sold directly to consumers. This is certainly a strategy still in evidence today. As a strategy though, it has one major fault: most people simply cannot afford to pay what information providers would like them to pay. Libraries themselves still offer a tempting target, with their large pools of money devoted to the purchase of information resources. More recently, the term has appeared in the library blogosphere in reference to e-books.16 The argument again is that publishers will go around libraries and market their offerings directly to patrons. However, as Carl Grant argues, library bypass strategies can be much more subtle.17 Considering the unlikelihood of any information corporation ignoring the temptations that library budgets represent, library bypass strategies were unlikely ever to be so straightforward. Instead of companies solely marketing to our patrons, what we see are libraries being bypassed in the selection of information resources themselves. We see this in the aggregated database, but also in large collections of e-books and discovery layers. Rather than the previous system, where we maintained a high degree of control over what was offered to our patrons, now much of that work has been handed over to the companies who provide the content, often via the discovery layer, which we will return to again shortly.
It is important to acknowledge that some of the problems in the contemporary library system are not caused by corporate control themselves, especially the problem of information overload. The dramatic increase in the number of published articles, journals, and books since the 1990s has only accelerated in recent years.18 While the desire on the part of corporations to tap new markets is certainly part of the cause of this explosion, the ease of electronic publishing, the increase in the number and size of universities, and the “publish or perish” dictum have all contributed as well. Maintaining bibliographic control and developing collections in this environment was always going to be a challenge. For some, the solution to the metadata problem has been to argue for the curtailment of traditional metadata and its replacement with Google and Google-like interfaces. The Calhoun Report, for example, advocated a variety of simplifications to metadata urging, “Abandon the attempt to do comprehensive subject analysis manually with LCSH in favor of subject keywords; urge [Library of Congress] to dismantle LCSH.”19 You can see this same argument in OCLC’s 2003 Environmental Scan report for libraries as well. That report proclaims, “Librarians and information professionals have had ample evidence for years that most searchers use a single term when searching—regardless of the sophistication of the interface. Why, then, do most library content interfaces still contain multiple search boxes?”20 The report also lists unattributed quotes from “people OCLC interviewed” including this telling one, “Creation of copy cataloging is not a sustainable model—there is less and less need for human-generated cataloging and less ability to pay for it.”21 However, as David Bade effectively argues, “The arguments for all these practices have been the same: doing something takes more time than not doing something; therefore, let us not do something so we can save time (and money), timeliness being to sole criteria of quality. What is diminished in every case is access, and it is the user who suffers the increased cost in time and money.”22 This relinquishing of bibliographic control in favor of speedy and cheap cataloging is an abdication of our most basic duty, “to save the time of the reader.”23
In addition to the loss of control, bibliographic and otherwise, the current information system creates a situation where the budget must grow every year just to keep pace and maintain the current collection. Unlike in the print days, keeping a steady budget means losing access not only to materials being published in the current year, but also to materials from past years. Not only that, but multiyear contracts keep us reliant on our existing products and leave little flexibility to change to new providers or select our resources more judiciously. It also means paying ongoing access fees for material we think we own. This loss of financial control combines with the loss of collection control to create a toxic situation that leaves libraries vulnerable to publishers and database vendors in ways not seen in the past. The drive to reduce costs feeds into the existing drive to outsource, eliminate skilled human cataloging, and give up our profession’s previous commitment to our role as collection builders and organizers. The consequence of this is that we have allowed our collections to become black boxes whose contents and costs we can never be sure of. Quick! What percentage of PsycInfo is indexed in your discovery layer? What percentage of Sage Journals are indexed, and on what schedule is new metadata added? Who created that metadata and with what kind of user in mind? What about the New York Times? Do these seem absurd questions in the current information environment? Or do they seem like the kind of basic knowledge about a collection most reference librarians at least should readily know?
The discovery layer itself is the ultimate manifestation of this loss of control. Consider the decision by EBSCO to pull their metadata out of Primo, Ex Libris’s discovery layer.24 From a corporate strategy perspective it makes perfect sense not to support a competing product, but to the libraries left in the middle, especially those with numerous EBSCO products and Primo, it highlighted how little power libraries have in this economy. Our contracts and sunk investment costs lock us into these products, while companies maintain the right to change them without our consent. With no ability to influence what content we are providing and how that content is prioritized in the discovery layer, and in many cases not even firm answers to these questions, how can we say we are living up to our values and supporting our patrons well? When we are forbidden by nondisclosure agreements to even share with our own patrons what material is indexed in these products, how can we claim to be acting as good stewards of the collection? Products like this damage us as a profession and reveal just how vulnerable libraries have become to corporate machinations. More than that, it damages our relationship with our patrons and frustrates our efforts to support them. To quote Grant, “[Libraries] are selecting discovery tools that provide quick, pre-defined, pre-packaged content with a discovery interface that doesn’t really meet the deeper needs of their users or their profession. Once they’ve done this, they’ve reduced their library’s value-add in the information delivery chain and they’ve lost another valuable reason for maintaining their library’s relevance within the institution and handed it to those that believe good enough is, well, good enough.”25 The discovery layer, perhaps more than any other recent development in the library world, highlights the fundamental power imbalance that exists in the information system as a whole. No single library is in a position to change this system alone. We need the profession as a whole to do that.
The Enclosed Digital Library and the Librarian
Librarians as professionals suffer too under the current system. By handing over so many of our fundamental tasks to vendors, collection development and cataloging for example, we have disempowered ourselves and reduced, as Carl Grant would say, our “value-add.” But more than that, in doing so our role in our communities is reduced and our relationship with our patrons is betrayed. We cease to be a neutral and objective partner in the information search and retrieval process and instead become drawn into the role of marketer for our library’s chosen set of products, always afraid that we are going to lose our jobs and even the entire profession to Internet search engines. As a profession, we have a rather serious problem, along with the other traditionally female professions, of self-doubt and criticism.26 This history of doubting ourselves, our skills, and our importance inhibits us from organizing both within our individual institutions and as a profession. It inhibits us from pushing back hard when vendors feed us marketing speak and insist that privacy is only a concern of librarians. It inhibits us from fighting back when administrators push us to accept products we all know are inferior and confusing to our users. Writing in 1982, Wilson argued that librarians consider themselves a “minority group” and handle their identity as such.27 I see little evidence that this has changed in the years since. Because we tend to see ourselves as a minority group and so seek not to identify with each other and with the profession as a whole, we are left vulnerable and divided, with serious consequences for ourselves and for the information system.
More than all of that, though, the system as it exists shelters us from the true consequences of our collective actions. We are protected from knowing the scale of the server farms and their carbon footprint. We do not have to worry about the proper disposal of outdated equipment. We are many steps removed from the mines where the ores and minerals that represent the physical manifestation of our digital collections were dug. The workers who built our equipment and those who maintain it never even receive a second thought from most of us. We live in a blissful ignorance that insulates us from the physical and social reality of our information system. And at the end of the day, that might be the largest problem we have. How can we advocate for change when we do not even realize we need change? How can we recognize ourselves as complicit in systems of destruction if we are never permitted to see that destruction? It is all too easy to claim that these concerns are too big, too broad, and too distant to deserve our attention, but if not us, if not one of the largest group of common keepers our society has, then who? Our organizations are morally accountable for the system we have allowed to prosper and into which we feed billions of dollars a year. If we are not responsible for its actions, than how can anyone be responsible for anything?
Notes
1. Jesse Hauk Shera, Sociological Foundations of Librarianship (New York: Asia Pub. House, 1970), G81.
2. Ibid., G82.
3. J. H. Shera, “Librarians against Machines. Librarians Are Having Difficulty Adopting the New Technology Because They Have No Professional Philosophy,” Science 156, no. 3776 (1967): 747.
4. Jean-Claude Guédon, “The Digital Library: An Oxymoron?” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 87 (1999).
5. Ibid., 18.
6. Jesse Hauk Shera, The Silent Stir of Thought: Or, What the Computer Cannot Do, (Geneseo, NY: The College, 1969), 11.
7. Leigh Estabrook, “Productivity, Profit, and Libraries,” Library Journal 106, no. 13 (1981): 1377.
8. Credit for plucking this poem out of obscurity goes to James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66, no. 1/2 (2003).
9. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 35.
10. Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), 12.
11. Smith et al., “Access to Electronic Health Knowledge in Five Countries in Africa: A Descriptive Study,” BMC Health Services Research 7 (2007).
12. Jean-Claude Guédon, In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2001).
13. Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, “The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and Its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing,” Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship 9, no. 3 (2008). http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguigan_g01.html.
14. Joseph J. Esposito, “Open Access 2.0: Access to Scholarly Publications Moves to a New Phase,” Journal of Electronic Publishing 11, no. 2 (2008).
15. Herbert I. Schiller, Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 81.
16. Jean Costello, “Library Bypass Strategies,” in The Radical Patron: Extreme Thoughts on Public Libraries (2009), www.radicalpatron.com/library-bypass-strategies.
17. Carl Grant, “Another Facet of the ‘Library Bypass Strategies,’” Thoughts from Carl Grant (blog), November 16, 2009, http://thoughts.care-affiliates.com/2009/11/another-facet-of-library-bypass.html.
18. Andrew Odlyzko, “Open Access, Library and Publisher Competition, and the Evolution of General Commerce,” Preprint. Submitted February 5, 2013, http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.1105.
19. Karen Calhoun, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, Special report prepared at the request of the Library of Congress, March 17, 2006, 18.
20. Cathy De Rosa, Lorcan Dempsey, and Alane Wilson, The 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition (Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2003), 99.
21. Ibid., 79.
22. David W. Bade, Responsible Librarianship: Library Policies for Unreliable Systems (Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press, 2007), 48.
23. S. R. Ranganathan, The Five Laws of Library Science, Madras Library Association. Publication Series.2 (Madras, London: Madras Library Association; E. Goldston, 1931), 336.
24. Iris Jastram, “Heads They Win, Tails We Lose: Discovery Tools Will Never Deliver on Their Promise,” Pegasus Librarian (blog), http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2011/01/heads-they-win-tales-we-lose-discovery-tools-will-never-deliver-on-their-promise.html, n2.
25. Grant, “Another Facet of the ‘Library Bypass Strategies.’”
26. Roma M. Harris, Librarianship: The Erosion of a Woman’s Profession (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1992), 61–76.
27. Pauline Wilson, Stereotype and Status: Librarians in the United States, Contributions in Librarianship and Information Science, no. 41 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1982), 138.