Rescue Monograph Publishing,
Get a Budget Increase
and Help Turn
Monograph Publishing back into a Vibrantly Growing Industry
Well-written monographs by leading researchers, scholars and professors are grossly undervalued.
This can be proven rather easily and affordably, providing academic and research libraries with
compelling justification for substantial budget increases for monographs. In addition, libraries can
further support monograph authoring and publishing and receive high value concessions from the
copyrights holders by promoting and optionally enabling direct purchase of monographs.
Increase Demand for ILL and Digital Document Deliver for Monographs
Implement DLSG’s HotLinks, the revolutionary new search-match facility that finds the 100 most
relevant chapters within all monographs in your library in an instant. This result cannot be
achieved
with simple full-text search of a few key terms (e.g. Google Scholar®), but instead, requires large
amounts of content as input. This requirement serendipitously fits perfectly with ways that
researchers conduct research and ways that students study. Nothing better characterizes a research
topic than the text the researcher has accumulated over the months and years. For students, the text
of one or several chapters currently being studied is a definitive characterization of the study
topic.
Get Budget Increases
Provide reports to funding authorities showing increased use of monograph resources, and request
monograph acquisition budget increases that represent a higher value (better cost-benefit ratio)
than many larger expenditures the university or research institute makes. If high quality print
monographs are used frequently and effectively, this investment is a bargain when compared with many
of the university’s much larger budget items. As an example, doubling library monograph expenditures
is only about 0.01%, or one ten thousandth of a typical R1 or R2 university’s budget. The resulting
improvements in education and research are certainly worth far more. Having just half of R1 and R2
libraries gradually increase monograph purchases by 10% per year for 10 years would provide top
researchers and scholars with confidence that the long and arduous process of writing a high-quality
monograph would not go unrewarded, thus creating a vibrantly growing monograph publishing industry.
In addition, monograph usage may increase so substantially that funding from sources outside the
university or research institute may become available.
In addition, DLSG’s system promotes purchases of monographs and optionally supports
direct purchase
of digital content for distribution using DLSG’s digital rights management system (DRM), if this
feature is enabled by the library. A student, faculty member, researcher or scholar may wish to
purchase a particular monograph found using DLSG’s revolutionary search-match facility, either
because their library doesn’t have the monograph or because they want instant and permanent access
to the entire volume forever.
The Best Solution: Search-match Enabled Concentrated Collections Areas
A great solution must be affordable and if possible, a variation of a proven strategy. Academic
Libraries have had concentrated collections areas for more than a century. Examples of traditional
CCAs are reading rooms, reference sections and special collections areas. In the 1960s and 1970s,
these traditional CCAs were modernized by adding photocopiers. CCAs were brought [partly] into the
digital age when their copiers were replaced with self-serve book digitization kiosks, over 90% of
which are KIC systems from DLSG.
To fully complete the transition into the digital age, existing CCAs could be enhanced with
full-text search, but something far superior is available. Rather than simply adding full-text
search, existing CCAs can be dramatically enhanced with DLSG’s revolutionary new HotLinks full-text
search-match facility.
The best solution may be a completely new CCA. While enhancing an existing CCA doesn’t require
reorganizing to create a new special space, creating the space for a new CCA that contains items
from your print collections that are most likely to be accessed, high value items that can be found
using DLSG’s HotLinks full-text search-match facility. The best choices for high use items is
probably a combination of professors’ recommended reading lists, researchers’ relevant monographs
lists and books that have been checked out more than once in the past few years. This new breed of
CCA offers great benefits to students, faculty, researchers and scholars, including:
- For course materials – including whole books and making them full-text search-matchable and
steps away from a very fast self-serve digitization kiosk (Note: during pandemics, DLSG’s CDL
solution supports controlled distribution of digital course materials)
- For professors’ recommended reading lists – including all books, not just the most important
ones that are put on reserves, making them full-text search-matchable and steps away from a very
fast self-serve digitization kiosk provides a far greater value than the reserves desk
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For researchers – just ask how much value they would place on being able to full-text
search-match all of the monographs in your print collections that they consider to be highly
relevant for their topic of research, and being able to make several ‘ILL’ (digital document
delivery) requests per month for PDFs of chapters from their chosen monographs (note: this
feature is supported by DLSG’s request-fulfillment workflow, which is fulfillable at around 10
chapter requests per hour using a fast new KIC system, enabled only if the library chooses, and
has extensive limiting controls to avoid work overload)
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For general use of your main print collections – this provides full-text search and search-match
for what is arguably the vast majority of the items in your collections that patrons would like
to search and search-match, and it also shortens the walk to the highest quality and fastest KIC
systems in your library
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With HotLinks’ optional random access to a digital sampling of pages in the chapter, users need
not depend on short bibliographic records that represent a 300 to 500 page book, but instead,
can sample some pages and self-determine their interest level (Note that this optional feature
emulates browsing books and leafing through the pages by book store patrons, and is considered
to be supported implicitly but not explicitly by copyright law, with one potential caveat – the
users should be able to purchase books that they find and like – see the next section on
optional support for purchasing content)
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Due to all of these wonderful benefits, monograph utilization will likely rise quite
substantially and provide the best possible argument for budget increases
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And finally, your extra spending on scholarly monographs will help motivate top researchers and
scholars to write more monographs
Note that just a few thousand books from your main collections can provide all of the above
benefits. A full-text search-match enabled Concentrated Collections Area (CCA) will
effectively digitally
enable most of an academic library’s print collections, legally and for very little cost. It
achieves all of these objectives by:
- complying with ©-Law Section 108 (see Library Superpowers)
- not requiring the purchase of any new digital licenses
- not requiring the purchase of new digitization hardware – the CCA option can be added to one of
your existing KIC self-serve digitization system
- concentrating a carefully selected 1-2% of your print collections into a small area with a fast
self-serve digitization system nearby, items that are most likely to be used repeatedly –
professors’ recommended reading lists, researchers’ relevant monographs list, and books that
have been checked out more than once in the past few years
- Providing the revolutionary new HotLinks full-text search-match discovery facility for these
items and capturing from each selected item, the metadata necessary for HotLinks – two to four
books per hour can be processed into the CCA
- Providing ILL services (digital document delivery) – DLSG offers a workflow system that can
fulfill ten or more requests for chapters per hour, and it has extensive throttle controls to
keep costs within budget
DLSG’s turnkey HotLink-enabled CCA systems are easy to setup. The biggest job is allocating the
space for the CCA, including the bookshelves that will hold a few thousand books. Here are the
steps.
- allocate the space
- request recommended reading lists from professors and relevant monographs lists from researchers
– you don’t need many respondents to get started. Early results will convince most of the rest
of the professors and researchers that it is worth their time
- provision the area with an existing KIC self-serve digitization kiosks or buy the latest model,
the fastest high-quality book scanner on the market
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Install the CCA and KIC ILL/DDD workflow options on the KIC system.
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Begin ingesting the selected items
The system is ready to use as soon as a sufficient number of items has been ingested.
A full-text search-match enabled CCA provides quick and substantial benefit to the
patrons of
individual libraries. Usage reports showing substantially increased use of monographs offer
compelling rationale for budget increases.
In addition, as the number of libraries setting up these modern CCAs increase, and if these
libraries procure increasing numbers of monographs, top researchers and scholars will be more
motivated to write high-quality monographs, which will stimulate monograph publishing.
Negotiating Better Deals with the Publishers with an Optional [ BUY ] Button
Interestingly, a rent/buy button is also a requirement for Fair Use
It is perhaps common knowledge that many librarians consider it
inappropriate or even unseemly to support purchasing content in their library or in any of its apps.
However, not only does a ‘buy button’ support a clause in the Fair Use section of ©-Law (Section
107), but offering users the ability to purchase and own a copy of content that they found in the
library is also a benefit to copyrights holders for which they would likely be willing to make
concessions that can be of very high value to your patrons.
Among the concessions that copyrights holders could be very willing to make is to explicitly give
your library the right to show users large samplings of digital pages of the chapters they found
using HotLinks. The copyrights holders may require that the sample pages be randomly selected, but
even so, these sample pages can uses to determine the quality and relevance of a chapter of a book
or a n entire book, which is very valuable. Having confidence that a particular monograph is of
sufficient quality and relevance can be used to promote 1) more ILL requests, which provides
rationale for library budget increases; and 2) instant sales, for example, when instant permanent
access to an entire volume is cost-justified. This will in turn promote more writing and publishing
of high-quality monographs, which is exactly in line with the constitutional clause that allows
copyright law to exist.
Note that DLSG’s solution finds content in excerpt size blocks that can legally be requested and
fulfilled via the library’s ILL services, so the random sample percentage can be set as high as 50%
or whatever percentage ensures that most users will need to make a formal ILL request or will simply
opt to purchase or rent the content, which is another DLSG-provided capability.
Note also that allowing random access to some pages closely emulates the practice of perusing a book
at a bookstore before purchasing it, and is highly likely to be judged as legal in a federal court
and is therefore very unlikely to result in a lawsuit. Also, if the library opts to enable DLSG’s
Rent/Buy button, showing random pages is probably necessary to promote sales, and therefore, quite
possibly a requirement for compliance with copyright law. Although this has is not explicitly legal,
it could be made so as part of the long overdue update to ©-Law Section 108, something like “… a
random sample of digital pages can be made viewable to allow potential buyers and ILL requestors to
judge the quality and relevance of the content for themselves.” Even as much as 50% of the
pages of
a chapter justifiable.
Alternately, the publisher can agree to an Aggregate CDL deal that allows libraries to display all
of the content while the user is in the library.
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:
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Big publishers exert big 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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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Academic library operations and resources
and how their patrons use them.
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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.
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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.
DLSG’s new technologies include:
- MyDocs free app for PCs, tablets and phones that can be downloaded from Windows, Android and Apple sites, manages study and research content with a personal network that works without the need for internet access once the content has been loaded
- KIC Study System, a part of MyDocs that includes ReadAlong Audio, computer-assisted speed reading (SKIM), custom flash cards, and a personal study coach
- HotLinks 2D full-text SearchMATCH discovery, preloaded with 16,000 OER books for students and 5 million Open Access Journal Articles for researchers, and compatible with your scholarly publisher content servers
- Personal Digital Mind Palace, which allows students and researchers to interconnect 199+ pages of their study content or personal research with millions of books and monographs and 100+ million journal articles.
- HotLinks and Mind Palace Collaboration System, comprising five to ten or more six-foot-tall floor-standing touch displays
- Concentrated Collections Areas, that can ingest up to five books per hour per worker into HotLinks, and support HotLinks 2D full-text SearchMATCH discovery, allowing discovery at the book chapter level.
- Two types of Digital Fence that allow digital images of copyrighted content to be viewed by multiple people in the same place as the owned copy, in compliance with ©-Law section 109(c): 1) for the entire campus; and 2) for inside a specific building, that uses WiFi signal strength and triangulation.
DLSG is ready to begin installing trials and it is time for academic libraries to learn thoroughly the merits of these new technologies firsthand. When considering whether to investigate asap or to wait for others to investigate, please consider the following:
- No other maker of library services technologies has ever invested so much in support of a growing future for academic libraries.
- For the first 15 years serving academic libraries, Image Access (and DLSG) profits averaged 3% - ever the optimists, DLSG always believed that adoption would eventually pick up pace, like it did for PC labs and ‘Internet Cafes.’ So DLSG stuck with low prices (and very low profits), and eventually, 70% of academic libraries (90% by budget) became customers, proving that DLSG had the right products all along.
- DLSG admits to not knowing how to present new technologies to academic libraries. Five years after the first dozen universities had purchased the first KIC Bookeye self-serve digitization systems, nearly half of the top 100 academic libraries had purchased some KICs, and lines of students waiting to use KIC were not uncommon, yet many academic librarians were still asking “Would students use this machine?” After another five years, 90% of universities (by budget) had adopted KIC, making it even more difficult to understand how so many libraries were unaware of the popularity of KIC with students five years into its successful adoption.
- When DLSG was founded (without high-tech venture capital), it was unknown to academic libraries. Yet its KIC, BSCAN ILL, Opus and Bookeye products eventually became preferred by 80-95% of academic libraries.
- DLSG strongly believes that partnering with academic libraries is the best way to serve society, but after such a substantial investment, DLSG cannot afford to be as patient this time as it was from 2005 through 2015 with its KIC, BSCAN ILL and Opus products.
A Four Part Plan for US Academic Libraries
to Restore Budget Shares to 1982 Levels (from 1.5% to 3.7%)
Academic libraries are typically large facilities located in the center of campus and are often very
beautiful. For as long as students have reasons to attend a physical university campus, its library should
play multiple important [digital age] roles in their learning experience. Academic libraries need a digital
age transformation. This requires additional funds that must be justified.
Part One – For the cost of reporting option, justify $100,000 in Budget Increases to Fund
Advanced New Library Technologies
Getting budget increases is seldom easy, but in this case, it is rational – university leaders are agreeing
every year to big publisher subscriptions fees, albeit reluctantly. It is easy to justify $2 per page as the
value your patrons receive from your BSCAN ILL and KIC systems, and this can justify significant budget
increases. For example, KIC self-serve digitization systems typically produce 10,000 to 50,000 digital pages
per year but cost less than $5,000 per year.
It is with great pleasure that DLSG offers libraries its new KIC Usage Reports. Please take a look at these
examples of real usage reports that have been redacted for respect for privacy.
Example KIC Usage Reports
Impressive KIC and BSCAN ILL usage reports combined with a realistic plan to significantly increase the
value of your beautiful, centrally located library, university funding authorities might just breathe a sigh
of relief as they approve additional funds.
Part Two – increase the amount of copyrighted content your patrons receive by 10%, 20%,
even 30%, by providing
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superior 2D full-text SearchMATCH discovery with Personal Digital Mind Palace for your print
collections
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instant ILL requests from within the 2D discovery system, with fulfillment directly into your
patrons’ own Personal Digital Mind Palace
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easy import from KIC self-serve digitization systems directly into your patrons’ own Personal
Digital Mind Palace
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Instant Digital Fence access to all content in your print collections – ©-Law section 109(c) access
while on campus or in the library
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Info Kiosks that directly promote substantially greater utilization of your print collections:
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More ILL and self-serve digitization of your print collections, and
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More direct access to your print collections using DLSG’s instant Digital Fence.
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More use of KIC Study System with ReadAlong Audio, computer-assisted speed-reading (SKIM),
custom flash cards and personal study coach
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Frequent use of your superior 2D full-text SearchMATCH discovery and Personal Digital Mind
Palace
Part Three – Provide superior 2D full-text SearchMATCH discovery with all of the above
features for your subscriptions-based digital content
Part Four – Provide superior 2D full-text SearchMATCH discovery with all of the above
features for copyrighted content that is neither in your library nor accessible via your digital
subscriptions.
You can begin a dialogue with DLSG by contacting our Customer Support, Technical Services or Sales departments at any time, by email or by phone.
561-886-2900, options 1, 2 or 4
