A Special Message for R1 and R2 Academic Libraries
Over 40 Years, These Libraries Lost nearly $10 Billion in Budget Share

In 1982, R1 and R2 academic libraries earned 3.7% of their universities’ budgets. DLSG plans to restore most of that 3.7% – DLSG has invested 300,000 engineering professional hours over eight years to create transformative new library technologies, and plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars more.

What Happened to Library Budgets?

Total Library Expenditures as a Percent of Total University Expenditures

ARL Statistics Annotated
IPEDS Survey Data more...

For academic libraries, declining relevance in the digital age, not publisher profits, is the main cause of declining budget share. Only one library technologies vendor could have invented technologies that can restore relevance in the digital age to 1982 levels of nearly 4% of university budgets. That vendor, DLSG, did not begin to envision the necessary technologies until 2015, after much research and learning. DLSG was also unaware until recently of the essential need for usage reports for its copyright law exceptions technologies, BSCAN ILL and KIC. Fortunately, after eight years investing 300,000 engineering professional hours, transformative solutions and reporting are both available.

Even if a technological solution to this problem was available during the past forty years, academic libraries would have faced major challenges while adopting the new technologies, including:

• Changing is challenging. Most academic libraries are ensconced in existing systems, policies and procedures that they rely on to provide essential metrics to university leaders to defend their budgets. Adding new technologies to the budget defense reports of existing integrated library systems requires active cooperation from the makers of these library systems, yet some of these library systems are owned by companies that are affiliated with big journal publishing conglomerates, presenting egregious conflicts of interest. For example, big journal publishers lose some of their pricing power when academic libraries utilize copyright law exceptions and limitations to deliver content economically. Also, librarians are typically anti-impetuous, a propensity that is normally good for their library, but can be very counterproductive when change is necessary. Consequently, the technology adoption lifecycles for libraries tend to be very long and arduous.

• Advanced technology innovators are discouraged from serving academic libraries. With such long technology adoption lifecycles for tech products made specifically for academic libraries and much shorter adoption lifecycles for nearly all other markets, financial reward cannot be a top priority for any technology innovator team that is considering serving academic libraries. Therefore, finding financial investors becomes essential, yet only altruistic or very long-term financial investors are likely to be interested, making success nearly impossible.

• Big publishers exert tremendous pressure. As the conglomerate journal publishers grew bigger and gained more power, they became more and more dominant in the minds of R1 and R2 library leaders, allowing them to steer academic libraries away from utilizing the exceptions and limitations that were written into copyright law specifically to restrain publisher profits – it seems that the copyright lawmakers knew that libraries would need exceptions and limitations to protect them from predatory publishers, especially journal publishers, because every journal article is unique, making journal publishing unavoidably monopolistic.

• No academic support. Library science college courses on the necessary digital age library technologies do not yet exist because the technologies have only recently become available – see the list below of all the necessary fields of expertise required to envision, design, develop and deliver a complex, interoperating technology ecosystem that is capable of restoring academic library importance on campus as the university’s central purveyor of vetted knowledge. It’s a chicken-or-egg problem not unlike a problem of the 1920s, when automobiles were built only for the rich, and against the general wisdom of the time, Henry Ford said “If I asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" and proceeded to design and build a high volume factory for making inexpensive cars for a market that didn't yet exist - for the fledgling American middle class.

However, for academic library leaders that have experienced much of the dramatic decline in their share of their university’s budgets, hindsight may be 20/20. For example, the big conglomerate journal publisher ‘bundle deals’ sounded great at first, but are now taking nearly half of R1 and R2 budgets while decreasing the value of physical library facilities and physical resources, including librarians. Even the form of controlled digital lending espoused by the CDL Implementers Group would have strongly promoted the consolidation of individual state universities into one statewide virtual service, further reducing the value of physical library facilities.

Fortunately, there are two very special exceptions and one very special limitation to publisher power written into copyright law to protect libraries from monopolistic pricing: Title 17 Section 108(d) and 108(f) and Section 109(c). These specific exceptions and limitation can dramatically increase the value that academic libraries contribute to education and research. They are all indelibly tied to physical facilities. Physical libraries are specifically protected by sections 108(d) and 108(f), while section 109(c) is an exception to copyright law specifically for ‘the place’ that books are kept.

From the beginning of this decline (in budget percentage) until the release in 2023 of major portions of DLSG’s Digital Stacks Ecosystem (DSE), neither any other vendor nor any academic libraries or their advisors (e.g. ALA, ACRL, ARL, etc.) have solved this existential problem of declining relevance. This is because it requires so much expertise in so many disparate areas and budgets that support experimentation, specifically:

• Publisher business practices and monopolies versus free markets in the digital age
  Copyright laws with their critically important exceptions were written to both protect and restrict commercial activity. Hence, to truly understand copyright law, the publishers and their business models must be thoroughly understood. For example, basic CDL is highly automated, entirely unrestricted, and entirely absent the controls necessary to ensure that libraries are not able to destroy the publishing industry simply by using CDL whenever possible – with extensive CDL adoption, all the people of the world are simply a library card away from never buying another book. The digital world is full of unintended consequences.

  

• The applicable parts of copyright law
  The copyright lawmakers provided for three major alternatives to buying from publishers, most notably, Title 17 Sections 108(d), 108(f) and 109(c). Perhaps the lawmakers anticipated today’s publishing monopolies and their unjustifiable price increases. To fully understand these copyright law exceptions requires more than a basic familiarity with the law.

  

• Academic library operations and resources and how their patrons use them.

• The applicable technologies
  The rapid advance and divergence of new technologies are the foundations of the digital future of humanity. Academic libraries do not represent a large enough market to attract multibillion dollar investments to create the many technologies needed to take full advantage of copyright law exceptions that are needed to reinvent academic libraries as fully digitally enabled institutions. It is entirely necessary and by far the greatest challenge for library leaders and their advisors to have the maximum possible understanding of all technologies that may be useful, as well as a thorough understanding of our digital future.

  

• Visionary abilities
  Sufficient abilities to envision new technologies that will increase library relevance far into the digital future in ways heretofore unthought of, and that are best suited for use in the library.

  Financial support for experimentation
  Even the best visionaries sometimes fail. High tech venture capitalists typically expect one in ten or even one in twenty investments to make it big.

  

In 2004, when DLSG was founded to provide advanced technologies to academic libraries, it had only three of the above assets: great book digitization machines (Bookeye), raw visionary abilities and some exceptional engineering resources. DLSG’s parent company, Image Access, had a sister company, Image Access Europe, that had just released its 2nd generation Bookeye planetary digitization machines. These book scanners proved to be better than scanners costing three times as much at that time, giving DLSG the impetus to invest every asset it had into making digitization systems for ILL, self-serve, and preservation.

Over the ensuing 11 years providing superior digitization technologies for digital preservation as well as self-serve and ILL digitization, DLSG gained a thorough understanding of library operations and the applicable parts of copyright law. Although it had more to learn, DLSG could see that no technologies existed to transform libraries into vibrant digital-age knowledge and information providing institutions that facilitate research and study in advanced new ways. Academic libraries were particularly negatively affected –R1 and R2 libraries had fallen below 2% of their universities’ budgets from a high of nearly 4%!

Academic and public libraries were simply adding services that had nothing to do with their massive investments in content, most importantly, their scholarly content. Among academic libraries, some were integrating with Google Scholar, and some were making deals with aggregators such as EBSCO. However, the additional value is not nearly enough to increase budgets substantially.

DLSG understood the full extent of the problem, saw the great value that a large building in the middle of campus, filled with paid-for scholarly content and professional facilitators of study and research, and concluded that the concept of academic libraries as ‘Knowledge Central’ for universities simply needs to be digitally enabled, completely digitally enabled. Fortunately, copyright law exceptions provide a major benefit to libraries, and they simply must utilize them as fully as publishers utilize the parts of the law that supports them, all as intended by the copyright law authors.

In addition, with the right technologies, academic libraries can facilitate study and research today in ways that were impossible until very recently. Hyper-fast CPUs, NAND memories, six-foot-tall touch displays, and other new technologies have only become available in the past eight years. Six-foot-tall touch displays are particularly interesting – they are so big that the overwhelmingly best location for them on campus is the library.

In 2015, equipped with a solid understanding of academic library operations and resources, the applicable parts of copyright law, free markets and monopolies in the digital age, an extensive knowledge of most modern digital technologies, proven visionary abilities, very highly capable teams of software developers, and enough conviction to invest over 300,000 engineering professional hours with no purchase guarantees from any university, DLSG began designing and developing an extensive suite of digital age library services. DLSG has also recently learned much about the commercial business practices of the biggest scholarly publishers.