Keynote: Revolution for Sure: Envisioning a 21st Century Information Organization

transcript

Revolution for Sure

David W. Lewis

NISO Virtual Conference: Revolution or Evolution: The Organizational Impact of Electronic Content

October 16, 2013

“That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” March 2009. Available at: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

Resulted in:1. Scientific Journal2. Novels3. Use of alphabetical order as a means of

organizing knowledge4. Silent reading

Resulted in:5. Literacy became an amateur activity6. Institutions that had controlled of

information lost that control7. Renaissance, Reformation, 100 Years War,

Agenda

• Ronald Coase• Job to Be Done• Tyler Cowen and Freestyle Chess• Michael Buckland• Digital Documents• Open Access as a Disruptive Innovation• The Flip• Subsidy Perspective

Ronald Harry Coase

“The Nature of the Firm” Economica 4 (16): 386–405 1937

Question: If markets are efficient, why do we have firms?

Ronald Harry Coase

Question: If markets are efficient, why do we have firms?

Answer: Transaction Costs

Ronald Harry Coase

• Where the market has high transactions costs firms bring activities in house

• When transaction costs are low, the market works and in house activities are dropped

“The Nature of the Firm” and Libraries

• In the past the market could not answer questions

• Now the market can answer many kinds of questions easily

• In the past the market could not manage collections

• Now access to many kinds of collections is easy

• What is hard now is curation and preservation of locally produced and special materials

Critical Question:

What knowledge management problems do our institutions and communities have that the market can’t efficiently solve?

These are the problems we need to focus on

Clayton Christensen

“Job to Be Done”

Carmen Nobel, “Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing,” Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School. February 14, 2011. Available at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall, “What Customers Want from Your Products,” Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School, January 16, 2006. Available at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5170.html

• People have jobs they need to do in their lives

• They want to do these jobs in the fastest, easiest, and cheapest ways possible

• They hire products and services to do these jobs

Clayton Christensen

“Job to Be Done”

Carmen Nobel, “Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing,” Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School. February 14, 2011. Available at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall, “What Customers Want from Your Products,” Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School, January 16, 2006. Available at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5170.html

• What jobs are scholars and students hiring the library to do?

• How do we provide products that do these jobs quickly, cheaply, and easily?

"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” — Theodore Levitt

People don’t want a library. People want information and answers.

“We're close to the point where the available knowledge at the hands of the individual, for questions that can be posed clearly and articulately, is not so far from the knowledge of the entire world...”

Tyler Cowen,Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation(New York: Dutton, 2013), page 7.

“Whether it is through Siri, Google, or Wikipedia, there is now almost always a way to ask and—more importantly—a way to receive the answer in relatively digestible form.”

• Freestyle chess• Professionals will be teamed with intelligent

machines• The combination of person and machine can be

much better than either alone, though the machine alone will be often superior to the person alone

• As a professional you need to add value above what the intelligent machine can do alone

• This is a different skill set than simply doing the task yourself

“Moore’s Law,” Wikipedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law

• Watson’s hardware cost $3,000,000 in 2011• By 2020 the same hardware can be expected

to cost less than $50,000• By 2030 it should cost less than $750

“The central purpose of libraries is to provide a service: access to information.”

Usually by providing access to documents

Michael Buckland,Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto (Chicago: American Library Association, 1992).

HTML version of the text is available at: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Library/Redesigning/html.html

1. Paper Library — both bibliographic tools and document are paper

2. Automated Library — tools electronic and documents paper

3. Electronic Library — tools and documents electronic

• Library collections serve two purposes1. Dispensing role2. Preservation role

• In the paper world the dispensing role is where the most money is spent

• When documents are paper, people and documents need to be brought together

• Best way to do this is local collections

• Libraries bring documents from the world to their local communities

• When documents are electronic, people can get them at a distance and instantaneously

• Bibliographic tools and documents move to world/web scale

• The dispensing role becomes cheaper• The preservation role becomes more important

Melvil Dewey

Our practices and values come from the Paper Library

Paper Digital

• Localized• One use at a time• Not easily copied• Inflexible, not easily

modified or annotated

• Storage bulky and expensive

• Universal• Many users at a time• Easily copied• Flexible, easily

modified and annotated

• Storage does not require much space and is cheap

Paper Digital

• Publishers needed• Long lasting medium• Preservation

strategies understood• Emotional

attachment to books as objects

• Anyone can Publish

• Vulnerable• Long-term

preservation uncertain

• Print books delivered nearly as quickly as digital files

• Digital readers nearly as good as print books

Content Supply Chain is All Digital

• You can purchase/access content only when it is actually needed

• Inventories of content are no longer required• Inventories become expensive overhead

Opportunity Costs of Print Collections

$5.00 to $13.10

$28.77

$50.98 to $68.43

Life cycle cost based on 3% discount rate. From Paul N. Courant and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” in The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship, CLIR, June 2010, available at: http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub147abst.html

$141.89

Content Supply Chain is All Digital

• Because marginal cost of distributing content is zero, new business models are possible

• Open Access is the most important so far

Open Access

• Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

• OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions).

Peter Suber, Open access overview, at: http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

Open Access

Open Access is:

1. A movement — response to excessive price increases by commercial journal publishers

2. A new business model for scholarly communication — costs covered upfront and the content is then given away

Disruptive InnovationClayton Christensen

Clayton M. Christensen, SC10 Keynote with Clayton Christensen, December 4, 2010, video running time: 1:00:28, available at: http://insidehpc.com/2010/12/04/video-sc10-keynote-with-clayton-christensen Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis, May 13, 2008, video, running time: 1:27:38, available at: http://video.mit.edu/watch/the-innovators-prescription-a-disruptive-solution-to-the-healthcare-crisis-9380/ Maxwell Wessel and Clayton M. Christensen, “Surviving Disruption,” Harvard Business Review 90(12):56-64 December 2012.

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Soares, and Louis Caldera, Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education, February 8, 2011, Available at: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2011/02/08/9034/disrupting-college/

Disruptive Innovation

• Needs– New Technology (simplified solution)– New Business Model – New Value Chain

• Starts as being not good enough and gets better fast and comes to dominate the market

• How products become cheaper, faster, and easier

100.0%

Pace of Substitution of Direct Gold OA for Subscrip-tion Journals

Laakso, et. al. Estimates S-curve Extrapolation Based on 2000-2009

S-curve Extrapolation Based on 2005-2009

David W. Lewis, “The Inevitability of Open Access,” College & Research Libraries September 2012. Available at: http://crl.acrl.org/content/73/5/493.full.pdf+html

100.0%

Pace of Substitution of Direct Gold OA for Subscription Journals (log scale)

Laakso, et. al. Estimates S-curve Extrapolation Based on 2000-2009

S-curve Extrapolation Based on 2005-2009

David W. Lewis, “The Inevitability of Open Access: Update One.” Available at: https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/3471

100.0%

Pace of Substitution of Direct Gold OA for Subscrip-tion Journals Based on Additional 2011 European

Commission Data

Laakso, et. al. Estimate with EC Data Extrapolation Based on 2000-2009

Extrapolation Based on 2005-2009 Extrapolation Based on 2000-2011

Extrapolation Based on 2005-2011

Old Model

Old Model“Good Old

Days”

Old Model“Bad Old

Days”

Open AccessFuture

The Flip

• In a paper world libraries brought documents from the world to the local community or institution

• In the digital world libraries collect and curate “documents” created by or of importance to the local institution or community for the world

The Subsidy Perspective

• If information is not cheap and easy, people will not use it to the extent that will maximize societal benefit

• Information needs to be subsidized

• Libraries have been one important means of providing this subsidy

See: David W. Lewis "What If Libraries Are Artifact Bound Institutions?" Information Technology and Libraries 17(4):191-197 December 1998. Available at: https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/434.

• What matters is that information is cheap and easy

• Preserving the subsidy matters

• Preserving the institutions that once provided the subsidy is not what is important

• What matters is getting the most scholarship to the most people

“That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” March 2009. Available at: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

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