Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President ITHAKA Sustainable Scholarship Conference September 2011.

Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President

ITHAKA Sustainable Scholarship Conference

September 2011

The Challenge

By 2020 the Web will contain…???

• 90% of published works prior to 1923

• Majority of works published to 2020

• > 20 billion pages of e-mail, phone logs, databases, blogs and websites (currently 12 billion)

• > 10 billion photographs

• > 40 million pages of facsimiles of manuscripts

• > 50 million audio files

• > 500 million video files

A Darwinian environment

– SilverPlatter MEDLINE (>$10m in sales)– Royalties to the NLM (<$200k)– Seven other vendors also making $$$

– SilverPlatter ERIC ($1.5m in sales)– Royalties to Dept. of Education (<$100k)– Many other vendors

– SilverPlatter SEC Online– No royalties going back to the SEC

What I remember of the environment in the early 1990s

– PubMed provides free access to the world

– ERIC offered free to the world – SEC filings offered free to the world

– What’s happened to the vendors?

Environment in 2011

– Ovid and others continue to profit from public domain MEDLINE

– New entrants – SilverChair, Collexis…– SEC filings continue to sell –

Bloomberg, Yahoo and many new entrants

– Aries Systems moved into publisher services

– CSC provides free access to all for ERIC with a 5 year contract for $29m

Environment in 2011

What’s going on?

This is a commodity…

This is not a commodity

Information isn’t a commodity!

Black & White

Grayscale

24 bit color

48 bit color

100 dpi

600 dpi

JPG

TIFF

Citation

MARC Record

Dirty OCR

99.995% rekeying

Semantic Indexing

Thumbnails

100 dpi

Page

Collection

Letter

Facsimiles

Transcriptions

EAD Finding Aid

Repository

Mobile Web

TCP-IP

Information isn’t a commodity

Source: Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom, Gene Bellinger, Durval Castro, Anthony Mills. http://www.systems-thinking.org/

Who, What, When, Where?

Therefore

Why?

Evolution of tasks

Fading Growing

Typesetting Printing

Print monograph Print directory

Public domain reprintsSimple, one database search

Rare and unpublished material

Linking

Licensing

Free materials

Semantic indexing

Process integration

Unified search software

Workflow tools

Warehousing

Community buildingAsset management

Commissioning?

Editorial?

Quality?Selection?

Speed?

With literally billions of pages…

What tools will we need ?

• Beyond paper

• Higher editorial value

• High functionality

• Semantically organized

• More comprehensive

• Individually customizable

• Discipline, community centric

• Web/network centric

• Add value to public domain– Rare, hard to find materials– Contextual essays and supporting material– Semantic Indexing– Unique functionality

• Go beyond public domain– Publish copyright material– Persuade publishers to release key content for electronic

publication– Commission new material ourselves

ASP experience…

The American Civil War Research Database

Great functionality

Women and Social Movements

• Collaboration with the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at SUNY Binghamton and ASP• Original site is free –new content is for fee.• Usage across the free site dipped only slightly – more usage following commercial launch.• Added video, audio, > 200k pages, new functionality.

Be of the web

Music

NewspapersWebsites

Monographs

Primary Works

Journals

Building the network…

Unhelpful

•Legal warnings not to link

•Changing links constantly

•Disabling links

•No permanent URLs

•No crawling

•Randomly changing URLs

•Insisting on one interface and one access point

•Unattached pages

Helpful

•Visibility

•Permanent URLs

•RSS feeds

•OpenURL

•Design for multiple interfaces

•Open to crawling

•Published open APIs

•Welcome linking

•Ask others to do the same

A Darwinian environment