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The following appears in the Autumn 2005 issue of University of Toronto Magazine:
If he traded his khakis and open-collared shirt for a monk’s robe, the bearded Rev. William Craig would not look out of place in a dank medieval library. But this is 2005, and the Anglican priest doesn’t need to roam the dark, mouldy corridors of a medieval library to do research.
In the cafeteria of Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, Craig, a doctoral student in theology, pulls out his wireless laptop computer, launches an Internet browser and calls up a digital book from the library’s electronic collection. The print version of the 221-volume Patrologia Latina, a massive 19th-century collection of a thousand years of church doctrine, would fill dozens of shelves. Yet Craig can scour the full text of every volume simply by entering a few words into the search box on the screen.
Academic research has changed remarkably since Craig began his student career in the 1970s. “When I was an undergrad, we didn’t have personal computers,” he says. Now he can find primary sources central to his thesis – on the 1604 Hampton Court Conference of King James I of England – with a few clicks of his mouse. Digital resources such as Early English Books Online, which contains nearly 100,000 page-by-page reproductions of books published between 1475 and 1700, have made research “infinitely” easier, says Craig.
Thirty years ago, card catalogues and printed periodical indexes ruled the library system. Then the digital revolution arrived. Computers replaced card catalogues and microfiche in the mid-1980s. Encyclopedias that appeared on CD-ROMs in the early 1990s gave way to easy-to-search electronic indexes and other reference databases on the World Wide Web.
But those early milestones were only a prelude. Thanks to the development of more powerful computers and larger databases, the number of library resources available in digital form is expanding rapidly. U of T’s electronic collection now includes almost 40,000 journals, more than 50,000 e-books and 1,000 indexes and other online reference tools. However, U of T’s e-collection is still dwarfed by the 15 million books and periodicals held by the university’s 32 libraries.
Peter Clinton, the director of information technology services for U of T Libraries (UTL), says the last few years have seen a quantum leap in the availability of full-text electronic materials – whole articles and books rather than just brief citations or abstracts. As a result, students and faculty can do an increasing amount of research from their computer desktops. Not surprisingly, they check out materials from the library less often. Over the past decade, the circulation of print items at UTL has dropped 20 per cent, due mostly to falling demand for print journals. In the field of physics, the latest research is published only in electronic form. When it comes to searching for library resources, students “want it now, they want it fast and they want it to work like Google,” says Clinton.
Visit UTL’s Web site and you’ll discover just how influential the popular Internet search engine has become. Front and centre on the home page is Google’s colourful logo. Click the link and you land on a page with the message, “There are limits to searching Google Scholar and you may find better quality information through the University of Toronto Libraries’ databases.” The wording is mild, but it’s evidence of the growing competition between academic libraries and major technology companies, such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon.
Google Scholar, a service started late last year that’s still in its testing phase, is the company’s first foray into academic research. It allows users to search collections of proprietary electronic journals and a variety of online repositories of scholarly papers. A Google Scholar search on “exosolar planets,” for example, returns 54 academic essays on the subject, ranked roughly in order of the number of times they’ve been cited. Within just a few months, Google Scholar has established itself as a rival to powerful multinational companies such as Thomson and Elsevier that offer huge (and, for libraries, hugely expensive) databases of scholarly material. Some librarians say that Google underperforms its rivals in the currency and quantity of its search results, while others declare that its simplicity is a huge advantage. “Google Scholar works. And it works in a way that presents very few of the hoops that we make students jump through to use our library databases,” writes T.J. Sondermann, an academic librarian and prominent blogger on library issues in the U.S.
UTL is not so conciliatory. The library is attempting to teach researchers that its resources are more specialized, in-depth and targeted to particular fields. Carole Moore, UTL’s chief librarian, says the problem is not that students use Google’s main search engine but that they use it primarily because they are unaware of alternatives. “Many students have a limited idea of how to search and of what they’re finding,” she says. UTL is conducting seminars on the use of library materials and Moore notes that once researchers are aware of what the library has to offer, they tend to lose their dependency on the search engine. “If researchers know how to use the databases, then that actually does bring them in for materials because it’s not all online,” she says.
However, Google isn’t standing idly by. The company is developing another service called Google Print that may encroach even more on the traditional turf of libraries. Last December, it announced a partnership with the New York Public Library and four major university libraries – Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Michigan – to digitize millions of their books. Publishers are expressing concerns about copyright protection, but even if Google limits itself to works in the public domain, the implications for academic libraries are profound. A Google search of the text of millions of instantly available digital books would be a more compelling first choice than even the largest library catalogue of physical volumes.
As Google expands into the academic realm, some argue that libraries should simply bow to its strengths. John Wilkin, a librarian at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, believes that the company’s dominance in online searching is inevitable. He says that libraries should “cede the generalist role to Google” and allow it to become a universal search engine for library materials. “We all love Google for its quick and dirty approach,” says Patricia Bellamy, a reference librarian at the Robarts Library. But Moore doesn’t share Wilkin’s view that libraries should relinquish their core business to Google. “I really don’t think we would want a world that was totally controlled by one search engine,” she says, noting that Google’s for-profit status puts it in a compromised position as an academic research tool compared to the non-profit neutrality of UTL. She adds that Google’s mandate is not to support academic research but to make a profit. If a service such as Google Scholar became unprofitable, the company might decide to stop supporting it.
To compete with Google, UTL, like other academic libraries across Canada, is facing short- and long-term challenges. In the short term, UTL must match Google’s ease of use. This means replicating the company’s one-stop search box. For libraries plagued with many different ways of gaining access to their diverse collections, as UTL is, creating a single search box to retrieve a broad range of materials is an obvious step toward making research more convenient for students. Currently, researchers must deal with separate entry points for the print catalogue, electronic index and abstract databases, e-books and e-journals, and UTL’s own scanned digital collections. Since 2002, however, UTL has been working with the libraries at all of Ontario’s universities to create the Ontario Scholars Portal, a single-box search engine that covers 7,300 electronic journals and 65 electronic indexes. Clinton says that the library is about six months away from its ultimate goal of tying its print catalogue, databases and catalogued Web resources to a single search. He admits that Google is innovating quickly, but says that libraries – and the electronic database vendors whose products they buy – are beginning to catch up. “Google, and in particular Google Scholar, has been a wake-up call for many of the information vendors,” he says.
Over the long term, the library is thinking about new ways that digital materials can be stored, packaged and delivered, says Moore. Like Google, UTL is digitizing books, but its focus is on its unique collections used by the U of T community and other Canadian researchers. So far, UTL has scanned thousands of rare illustrations of human anatomy, explorers’ documents and early Canadiana from the university’s rare-book collection. Progress has been slow, but last September UTL began a pilot project with a non-profit organization called Internet Archive to digitize books using a robotic scanning machine provided by the archive. Under the arrangement, U of T pays Internet Archive 10 cents US for every page scanned. Internet Archive, which is based in San Francisco, keeps one copy to add to its digital collection and U of T keeps one copy.
One year into the project, UTL has paid for about 2,000 scanned titles, ranging from a copy of a 1475 edition of St. Augustine’s City of God to war memoirs and literary texts. Over the next two years, the project will digitize all of the known editions of books and print material – about three million pages in total – by John Henry Cardinal Newman, a 19th century Christian theologian. The effort, a joint project of three American partners and St. Michael’s College at U of T, should enable researchers to detect subtle changes in Newman’s language that would otherwise take years to discover, says Jonathan Bengtson, the chief librarian of John M. Kelly Library at St. Mike’s. “Such analyses will lead to a deeper understanding of the development of Newman’s thought,” he says.
Google’s somewhat grandiose mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” With a market valuation in July of more than $80 billion US and quarterly earnings of $343 million US, the company is in a far better financial position than UTL. The library system is stretching its resources to the limit to compete with the ease and scope of Google as well as preserve its traditional collections and services. Unlike Google, which publicly announced that it plans to spend up to 30 per cent of its earnings on new product development, UTL has no capital for innovative projects. While UTL has managed to maintain its acquisition spending in real terms, it has had to contend with university-wide funding cuts that in the past decade have led to a 30 per cent reduction in library staff.
In the 2003-04 academic year, UTL’s total acquisition budget was $25 million, of which about half was spent on scholarly journals. Because some members of the university community prefer the print format, while others request electronic, UTL often acquires both – frequently at a higher cost, and with the associated headache of storing all those volumes. The university recently spent $6 million on an off-site, climate-controlled preservation space, to keep two million books. “I spent 10 years seeking this facility, because we’re out of space,” says Moore. Located near U of T’s aerospace building in Downsview, the warehouse is expected to be enlarged to hold five million volumes by 2020.
As UTL attempts to secure a role for itself in the Google Age, it’s reconsidering its traditional reliance on publishers and vendors and beginning to act a little like a publisher itself. Last year, for example, the library developed T-Space, a university-wide digital repository that holds thousands of documents, including course mate-rials and unpublished scholarship that would previously have fallen outside the library’s mandate to collect. Modelled on a similar repository developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, T-Space lets students download specialized course materials and allows faculty to post papers and research findings in a public venue without first having to find a publisher.
As UTL boosts its technological capabilities, Moore likens the direction that the library is heading to a much earlier forebear – a medieval library. These institutions of the Middle Ages were not only book storehouses but places where manuscripts were rewritten and information was combined and republished in new ways, she says.
As for Rev. Craig, who has watched the world of print expand into the broader possibilities of digital texts, the library has become an even more stimulating place to be. Writing a dissertation is still not easy, but he says that research “is a lot more fun” when the wealth of the world’s knowledge is at your fingertips.
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This essay appears in the April 2005 issue of Quill & Quire magazine:
Remember e-books? If you thought they were an aberration of the late 1990s, like new Volkswagen Beetles or Ricky Martin, you’re wrong. They’re coming back – and this time, driven by a new format of reader-friendly electronic paper, they’ll be here to stay.
If the Dutch electronics giant Philips and other manufacturers have their way, we will soon enter a new era of electronic scrolls. These will be cheap, plastic screens that will look and feel much like paper; they will unroll from a pen-sized holder or cellphone and download the day’s newspaper (or a new novel) through a wireless Internet connection.
Such an era is still five years away or more, and there are still some major technical hurdles for e-paper to overcome. But with newspapers and magazines desperate for young readers, and signs that e-paper textbooks would be a hit among college students, a critical mass for e-books could be just around the corner. If marketed properly, e-paper could even lead to a revitalization of mass-market and backlist publishing.
The concept of e-paper – a bendable screen with rewriteable electronic ink – has been around for years, but a flurry of recent developments suggests that the phenomenon could go mainstream by the end of the decade. Last April, Sony’s Japanese division launched a first-generation version of e-paper technology, the Librié e-book reader. Although its rigid plastic body can’t be rolled into a pocket, the device quickly earned kudos from reviewers for the newsprint-like clarity of its six-inch display.
The Librié’s display, which is licensed to Sony by Philips in partnership with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based E-Ink, replaces the LCD screen typical of Palm Pilots and cellphones with a plastic membrane containing thousands of tiny black-and-white particles. An electric current creates a static charge that aligns the particles to create text or monochrome images on a whitish background. The Librié boasts a resolution of 170 dots per inch, over twice that of a standard computer monitor, and features one of e-paper’s main advantages over other electronic displays – the screen image remains in place when the power is turned off. Sony claims that the Librié’s three triple-A batteries should last through 10,000 page views.
Sony’s device is seen as the first major market test for e-paper, which is expected to appear in flexible versions in the coming years. Philips has spun off a dedicated research unit to pursue further applications, and early last year the division announced it had created a five-inch screen of 85 dots per inch that could be rolled into a tube two centimetres wide. (The company’s website features photographs of several fanciful-looking concepts, including a wrist-sized GPS locator with an unrollable map, a pen-sized reading strip, and a cellphone scroll.)
Philips is not the only electronics megacorp working on e-paper technology. Fujitsu and Epson have both announced efforts to release flexible e-paper, next year and in five years respectively. E-paper is also a hot topic in academia, with numerous projects in North America, Asia, and Europe reporting progress in creating flexible displays in colour and speeding refresh rates to accommodate video transmission.
For now, though, e-paper is not without technical problems. It’s sluggish to use – Philips’ Librié screen takes half a second to update – and it has durability issues as well. In existing flexible prototypes, for example, the more the plastic sheet is bent, the faster its circuitry will degrade. Epson estimates that its own flexible e-paper would only last a few months before wearing out; the company’s betting that Japanese consumers’ appetite for newspapers and magazines will keep them buying replacements. (Just how pricey e-paper would be remains to be seen. In a December story in PC World magazine Epson estimates that a letter-sized e-sheet would cost “well under $100 [U.S.]”) The long-term effectiveness of the e-ink itself is also untested, and the drive to improve resolution and to introduce colour means increasing the complexity of the microcapsules that control the image.
Certainly, e-paper’s development has been relatively slow. The concept of charged-particle electronic ink was invented in the 1970s by Xerox, whose spinoff company, Gyricon, has since concentrated on developing a line of e-paper-based commercial signage. Electronic ink for reading devices has been spearheaded by Gyricon’s main rival, e-Ink, which was spun off from MIT in 1997. With no shortage of chutzpah, the company’s founder, Joseph Jacobson, made waves at that time with his ambitious plan for a “last book,” a bound collection of several hundred e-pages that could be used to download an entire library’s worth of titles.
Such a book is still a long way off, but the current pace of research suggests that the basic challenges of e-paper will be resolved in the next few years. Should charged-particle ink prove too complex to refine further, for example, flexible e-paper may emerge from another technology, such as Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLED), which, like e-ink, also retain an image when the power is off.
Once the technological glitches are worked out, a number of factors suggest that e-paper readers could succeed where first-generation reading appliances, such as Gemstar and Rocket eBook readers, did not.
First, e-paper promises a far superior and more intuitive reading experience than current LCD screens and computer monitors. That fact in itself should win converts from those who currently view reading electronic text as an eye-straining chore. Sony’s Librié, for example, can be read in low-light conditions at a variety of angles, and it does not require a backlight. The reading experience should also improve as the resolution of e-paper increases. A guru of computer usability, Jakob Nielsen, pointed out in 1998 that existing computer screens cause people to read about 25% slower than printed paper, but that gap disappears when the resolution improves to print-like quality. There’s no reason why E-Ink’s stated goal of “radio paper” – a rewriteable medium with the look and much of the feel of real paper – should not find a ready audience with casual and dedicated readers alike.
Second, e-books have already been selling well for PDAs and similar devices. Granted, the quantities are small compared to overall print sales – less than 0.1 per cent of the $20-billion-plus U.S. publishing industry. But the Open eBook Forum reports that e-books have seen steady double-digit growth quarter by quarter since 2002. So far, e-books are largely an add-on item for multitasking handheld devices, raising the question of whether a dedicated e-paper reader would attract PDA afficionados or be seen to lack versatility. But encouraging signs of e-book growth suggest that the e-book market is ripe for expansion and could “tip,” given the right combination of affordable, high-quality hardware and plentiful, easy-to-access content, a combination that has been lacking in the e-book readers released so far. The stickiness of the iPod is a valuable lesson here: promote the readers not as a tech gadget but a lifestyle accessory, give users a way to network, share booklists, and build insider knowledge, and there’s no reason why a measure of the iPod’s success can’t be translated to an e-book device, especially one aimed at digital-savvy youth. The higher-ed textbook market would be a natural starting point to introduce such readers. Experiments in electronic textbook delivery are becoming more common – witness Pearson’s SafariX e-textbook venture launched last year – and e-paper readers would offer a lower-cost alternative to laptops and tablet PCs for accessing textbook content and other online course materials. Were educational publishers to adopt a licensing model for their electronic editions that would bill institutions by student usage of particular texts – similar to how databases and software are licensed now – publishers’ fears of revenue loss from piracy would be allayed while e-texts would gain a widespread, institutional footing.
Third, the newspaper and magazine industries are increasingly desperate to attract a new generation of subscribers, giving them a strong interest in supporting wireless e-book readers for their electronic editions. (Here, an open e-book standard would be key to take advantage of an e-text market rising on several fronts.) One analyst with the International Newspaper Marketing Association recently called for a downsizing of broadsheets to a newsmagazine format that would be easier to adapt to a variety of electronic displays. Newspapers and magazines also have an incentive to push for electronic delivery both to cut production costs and to boost revenue by creating segmented advertising targeted to specific reader groups. This market will also become more viable as wireless connectivity becomes even more pervasive, which is expected to be a further by-product of the plastic chip revolution driving e-paper itself.
The prospect of widely available e-paper readers for newspapers and textbooks are the best hope publishers have of gaining niche e-book sales for general-interest and backlist titles. Random House veteran Jason Epstein has proposed a national infrastructure of print-on-demand machines to do just that, but mustering the resources to create such a network remains the major barrier to his proposal.
In theory, there should be nothing to stop publishers, either individually or collectively, from serving e-books through the web. That’s the easy part. The hard part will be to create a digital rights scheme that protects creators while fostering demand. That, of course, is the million-dollar question. In Sony’s case, praise for the Librié’s hardware has not blunted reviewers’ disdain for its limited, proprietary content and restrictive 60-day access terms. Perhaps Sony should have taken another lesson from the iPod; users, it seems, will buy into a digital delivery model that is convenient, offers plenty of choice, and is perceived to be fair.
Naturally, publishers will need to weigh security concerns and issues of digital rights management, but they should also factor in users’ perceptions of quid pro quo. Choice will be the most important factor. Five years from now, full-text searching of many thousands of books from one’s desktop will be commonplace (courtesy of Google and Amazon), and users will expect to be able to acquire and to read those books instantly. Publishers would do well to consider the possibilities of broad collaboration with other print media to create a new-style content distributor. They might, for example, offer a database of titles so large that users are willing to pay by subscription for time-limited access (a rent-your-library option), or allow users to purchase long-term access to titles and to be able lend them to their friends (a build-your-library option). The iPod works in part because its infrastructure is impressive and robust. After some disappointing starts with e-book readers and other e-book ventures, such as netLibrary, publishers will have perhaps one more chance with e-paper to build a distribution platform that is sticky enough to draw consumers in.
The potential for e-paper to provide a rewriteable newsprint – and to be potentially as ubiquitous as newsprint is now – could represent an enormous opportunity. It will be up to publishers to work the numbers, but, as with Epstein’s famous introduction of the first quality paperbacks half a century ago, e-paper may also require a leap of faith.
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The Historical Atlas of Canada is a beautiful example of information visualization in the best sense: enormous volumes of data are compressed into the simplicity of what is at first glance a purely aesthetic experience. Such lovely, detailed maps, and—look!—how informative, too.
As the atlas moves online the print version’s stunning artistry is being replaced by the online version’s utilitarian interactivity. The change highlights the increasingly antique status of certain kinds of reference books, while raising questions about whether an interactive resource can make a cultural impact. Read on.
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If you’ve seen the Canadian National Railways logo, you’ve seen the work of Allan Fleming, who in the 1950s and 60s made his reputation as one of the most talented graphic designers in Canada. At the height of his career he decided to shift from the glib world of advertising to the genteel avenue of book publishing by offering to design books full-time—with a corresponding cut in pay— for the scholarly publisher University of Toronto Press. If only publishing didn’t make you have a heart attack and die….
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MIT’s Technology Review has an interview today with Tim Berners Lee (free subscription required), the guy who invented the web in the early 1990s and is working to make it a lot smarter. His vision would have the web be able to access vast networks of meaning, not just individual web pages, in order to (in the now-hacknied example) be able to book an airline flight for you using automated web agents. It’s an ambitious plan that would require the web adhering to an increasingly complex set of standards to allow common definitions, the creation of interacting ontologies, and the ability for automated “web bots” to make elaborate logical inferences to carry out actions. I wrote a slightly breathless essay a year ago on the Semantic Web’s potential to augment or—menacingly— supplant the capacities of human memory. With apologies to medieval codicologists and paleographers (those who tend to know what they’re talking about when discussing medieval manuscript and handwriting development) I made some fast and loose comparisons between the web and medieval books. The current web (or parts of it) is adopting more structural complexity (through tools such as XML and the Resource Description Framework) that appears to parallel certain 9-12th century developments in medieval book design (such as the introduction of word spacing, section headings and indexes) that make information easier to read and use. But where one might argue that medieval books became more structurally efficient to help people remember what was written there, the Semantic Web appears to promise that people won’t have to remember anything at all.
Berners-Lee says little new in the interview, and skirts the Semantic Web’s major challenge of attempting to have the loose baggy monster of the existing web evolve into the highly structured machine that would be its Semantic counterpart. Standards, yes, but open, public and free, yes too. Good luck, sir.
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