Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, Vol. 15, pp. 261-264, 1991 0364~6408/91 $3.00 + .oo Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright 0 1991 Pergamon Press plc

CHARLESTON CONFERENCE 1990

PUBLISHERS, LIBRARIANS, AND THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE

GORDON GRAHAM

Editor, LOGOS

5 Beechwood Drive

Marlow, Bucks SL7 2DH

England

The so-called information chain is roughly hexagonal-from author to publisher to printer to vendor to librarian to reader, the ultimate consumer, who closes the loop with feedback to the author. We can be sure that the loop is always closed, because every author has at least one reader. This suggests an important caveat-that we must be careful that being published never becomes more important than being read. Indeed, if we accept entry into a database as tantamount to being published, then there is material today that has no readers at all-a pronouncement into a vacuum. Publishers now and then receive humbling lessons on whether what they have published is being read. In a directory published by one of the companies in the Butterworth group, a politically minded compositor entered some rude words. It was six years before anyone noticed.

What we loosely call information technology has profoundly altered the tools and meth- ods of each of the six players, but not to the same degree. The roles of three of them- the author as originator, the printer as manufacturer, and the bookseller or subscription agent as distributor- have remained clearly demarcated. Those of the other three-publisher, reader, and librarian-have begun to impinge on one another. That is why these three form a trian- gle of increasingly difficult relationships. Desk-top word processors, copying machines, and fax machines tempt every reader to see himself as a potential publisher. Electronics facilitate a new brand of secondary publishing whose only function is to change the format of what has already been published. I heard recently of a facsimile service that offers its subscribers, on their home faxes each evening, reproductions of the financial pages from the following morn- ing’s newspapers-a kind of opportunistic parasitism that is certainly not publishing. Doctoral theses available on demand-if there ever is a demand: Is that publishing? Grey literature, mountains of it, produced by industry for its own purposes, seldom edited, never catalogued, never tested in the marketplace: Is that publishing?

Some readers who have become database users see a future when they will no longer need librarians. Some librarians who see themselves as information brokers do not need readers. Through document supply, interlending, and resource sharing, librarians have assumed some of the publishers’ traditional functions. Some publishers of databases have assumed the librar-

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ians’ role as storehouses and disseminators of material accessed on request rather than sold. Some readers talk to each other on their terminals and imagine a future when they will need neither librarian nor publisher. Professional literature, apparently, will be an indiscriminate flood of unedited messages.

This probing across traditional boundaries, encouraged by the technology lobby, who see themselves as a homogenizing empire, has the makings of an identity crisis. At the very least, it induces insecurity, which is intensified by the shadow of the info-glut-too much informa- tion chasing too little money. Publishers live always under the pressure of the excelsior syn- drome, which means that each year has to be better than the last and that success equals stress. Librarians are caught between an oversupply of literature, an undersupply of funds, and cli- ents who are oblivious to both. Readers, seduced by the magic of reprography, think every book and journal is unnecessarily expensive. Quantity is gaining on quality. Information is subsuming literature.

The challenge to all three players is to manage change. The danger is to think that it can be managed by moving into someone else’s patch. We have to see technology as a tool, not a master. We have to see that what is technically feasible is not for that reason socially desir- able or economically justifiable. We have to raise the level of the debate above the commer- cial, where the breathing gets heavy, to an altitude where mutual respect and common cause override our more primitive instincts.

That is all rather high-flown stuff, which I wouldn’t be able to enunciate had I not, in my recently concluded career as a publisher, participated in numerous three-way conflicts that il- lustrate how the heat of controversy is proportionate to the economic threat and the fear, un- derlying this threat, that status and even identity might be lost.

The way forward always becomes clearer when we keep our eye on the function, not the form. The service we render justifies our existence, not the tools we use. After World War II it was said that in future wars the infantry would not be necessary. But somebody has to walk over the territory, step by step. Publishing, librarianship, and the act of reading are all step- by-step processes, their success depending on individual care and judgement.

Among jungle warfare issues of the past 20 years, in one or more of which everyone here must have participated (and which are still going on) are copying fees, deposit copies, pub- lic lending right, permanent paper or the control of electronic data. I have excluded journal prices from this list, because I want to make the point that this debate, which has occupied much of the energy of the past Charleston conferences, is part of a larger picture. We should be able to draw constructive lessons from all the three-way battles, and, by keeping our eye on the whole picture, see each of the parts more clearly.

That is my excuse for describing briefly a prolonged skirmish in which I participated- the introduction of full-text, on-line database publishing to the British legal profession.

In the late 197Os, the British legal publishing scene gave no sign that it held the ingredients of impending conflict. A few long-established publishers served British lawyers with the tools of their trade in the form of textbooks, journals, encyclopedias, or looseleaf services. But the technological imperative was looming. Everyone knew it was feasible to store and search the full text of law reports and legislation in a database. It had been happening in the United States for several years. Everyone knew that the corpus of legal text was now so large that print had ceased to be efficient, These perceptions did not mean that everyone got together and talked about it. Legal publishing is a secretive and reclusive world. So everyone worried separately. The publishers worried about risk and investment. Lawyers worried about what it would cost. The older lawyers worried about whether they would understand it. Librarians worried about control.

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The next 10 years proved that all worries were justified. After Butterworths announced that they were signing a licensing agreement for the LEXIS system with the Mead Corporation, Dayton, Ohio, a group of practitioners called the Society for Computers and the Law took the position that it was totally wrong for a commercial publisher to make money out of such a venture. Why not the profession? Why not the universities? Why not a cooperative? Was the law not public domain? (Besides, LEXIS was American; English law should be in a Brit- ish system.) They made plans to rent a computer and set up their own system.

Failing to raise capital, the Society persuaded a competing publisher to set up a new data- base and system from scratch, on the theory, no doubt, that while they objected to one cor- poration making money, they did not object to two losing money. And that is what happened for several years while the two systems slugged it out in a marketplace that was financially and psychologically ready for neither of them.

During this process, the publishers learned to acquire a much closer interest in their readers, now called users, than they had ever had before. When you sell a book or journal, you as- sume, rightly or wrongly, that the buyers will read it, but what they do with it is really their business. When you sell an on-line service, on the other hand, you don’t make any serious money until the buyer uses it; and if he does not use it, he is going to send it back.

So the publishers ran classes to teach lawyers how to use the system and sent representa- tives into legal offices to work with the users -activities that made some librarians uneasy. In the large legal firms and in the universities, the librarians had a strong tendency to take charge of the terminals, not unreasonably, since the cost was probably coming out of their budgets. In some universities, all the students saw of the terminals wti over the faculty’s shoul- ders. And in some legal firms, the partners had to go to the library to get a turn.

Looking back, one can see how the technology inserted a new format that confused the functions. There was a lot of angst. The competing organization lost many millions of dol- lars before it closed down. Instead of the three years that Butterworths forecast, it took 10 years to break even. There were lawsuits and drama, as, indeed, also occurred in the United States. But the main lesson was that the printed word was not, as some forecast, diminished. It was supplemented by the new medium, in the application of which publishers remained pub- lishers; librarians were still librarians; and readers were still readers. Whether the triangle is eternal or not, it proved, after a period of the shakes, that it can survive in, and serve, the in- formation society.

We have difficulty in taking an overview because we are almost all specialists, not by choice, and tend to engage each problem in isolation. Then we begin to think there is something wrong with the structure. We are like a town with smog discovering the total environment. Just as government, business, and the citizenry have difficulty in evolving an agreed ecological pol- icy, so do publishers, librarians, and the scholarly community have difficulty in evolving an agreed information policy. Info-glut is a form of overpopulation. Literature, like daily life, gets debased by the overuse of technology. Then we have mutual suspicion of vested interests, and we want to know, all the time, who is going to pay?

If the diagnosis is correct, we have two possible courses of action. One is to remain behind our parapets and use dialogue as a form of missile. The temptation to do this is strong when tensions and frustrations are high. And there are some publishers and librarians who have taken this position over the question of journal prices. The other course is to reason together, for which Charleston provides a fine opportunity. But conferences should be more than mo- ments of truce or truth.

Having first experienced Charleston from the point of view of chief executive of a large pub- lisher, I now participate as one from the coalface, and I am glad to report that this does not

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change my perception of the usefulness of this conference. The “plain and simpIe truth,” for which this conference aims to be seeking, is that the librarian/publisher relationship was too long taken for granted. In the past 10 years or so, we have just begun to give it the care and attention it needs, and this is proving to be a painful process. But it hurts less when we talk about it. A good conference like this is more than a series of speeches analyzing issues, more than the interplay of debate. It is an opportunity for a diverse group of professionals to ac- knowledge to each other, by their presence and by their attitude, that they recognize their com- mon causes. No one knows better than this audience that speeches and books and journals and papers and meetings are important catalysts, but it is the actions that count.