WHERE’S THE MONEY?Dorothea Salo

AGENDA

• How does humanity fund culture?• Popular publishing: crowdfunding• Library/archive crowdsourcing • Scholarly publishing• Library as publisher

FIRST... SOMETHING WE’VE LEARNED• Money (especially post-creation sales) is an absolutely

TERRIBLE proxy for cultural value. Just wretched.•We saw that with monographs (undervalued), serials (many

overvalued), news (undervalued and getting worse)...

• At this historical moment... we’re relying on “will sell = good” much more than we probably should be.

• But it’s such an easy heuristic to use that it’s critically hard to walk away from. Including in librarianship.•The Open Web vs. The Library, anyone?

• I think we have to figure out how, though. You may disagree.

FUNDING CULTURE

TAKE A MOMENT...• You want to make your living writing popular fiction.

What are your options?• You want to make a documentary, but you don’t have the

money. What are your options?• You want to start a community choir. What are your

expenses, and what are your options?• You want to build an archive and mini-museum for a local

celebrity. How do you keep it afloat financially?

YOU WILL FACE THESE QUESTIONS,AND OTHERS LIKE THEM.

WE DON’T GET TO SKATE ANY MORE,IF WE EVER DID.

And we owe it to the people whose stuff we work withto consider these questions on their behalf as well!

OPTION: SELL SOMETHING• The most obvious one, right? ... right?

•At this moment in time, yes... but it has not always been so. Hold that thought!

• The “what” changes as technologies do.•Late 19th/early 20th c.: sheet music was a big seller!•Then along came the phonograph...•... and after that various other generations of recording and

playback devices...•... and now the Internet. Yes, people buy mp3s!

• We’ve spent most of the course talking about how this plays out for various text-based artifacts.

RELATED OPTION: SELL SOMETHING ON THE SIDE

• Advertising, anyone?!•It’s not what journalism is “for” exactly, but it’s a saleable thing that has

allowed journalism that wouldn’t otherwise pay for itself to be done at all.

• Comic books ran on this in the 1980s.•The variant-cover thing was absolutely a bubble, but the point remains.

• I’ve seen a pretty convincing argument that a LOT of trade/popular nonfiction exists to advertise its authors for lucrative speaking engagements.

OPTION: SELL AN EVENT

• Music, post-Napster: “they’ll make money touring.”•Well. Maybe. Harsh life, though.

• How movie theatres stay in business?

OPTION: SOLICIT DONATIONSOR INVESTORS

• The public-radio, public-television model•Which is starting to emerge in indie form, e.g. Patreon, Gittip

• The stock market! (“Going public”)•Which brings its own set of constraints and issues, e.g. short-

term thinking, heavy reporting responsibilities, problematic governance structures, ethics failures, looty management

•Part of what killed major newspapers? Homogenized broadcast media? Homogenizing publishing?

OPTION: COLLECTIVE CULTURE• We don’t just consume culture; we make it, too!• And this doesn’t have to cost a lot; in fact, it’s historically been

self-supporting to an extent.•Think about all those music scenes in movies set in the Regency era. There

was a reason music and art were considered “accomplishments” for ladies!•Craft (of many kinds), storytelling, visual art, dance, ritual, poetry slams...•Digitally: fanfic/fan art, supercuts, .gifs, blogging, Twitter fiction, etc.

• Libraryish things, too. Little Free Libraries? The Occupy libraries?•But do libraries proper support collective culture? How? What about

archives?•And I don’t need to say anything else about the current copyright regime’s

opinion of collective culture, do I?

OPTION: PATRONAGE• Rich people or organizations fund culture, for an audience

of those like them, or for others•Classic (heh) example: Western European art music•Library example: Andrew Carnegie!

• Governments, churches, individual philanthropists...•Newspapers: classically family-owned in the US!

• Always assume there’s an agenda!•And the agenda affects the culture produced.•True in libraries and archives too. Like Wikipedia, we are not and

have never been politically or socially “neutral” organizations!•Supposedly “charitable” or “progressive” agendas can hide a lot

of condescension, misunderstanding, and oppression.

ON PATRONAGE

• “Tell a man what he may not sing, and he is still half free; even all free, if he never wanted to sing it. But tell him what he must sing, take up his time with it so that his true voice cannot sound even in secret—there, I have seen, is slavery.”

• Mary Renault, The Praise Singer• (Take a moment: examples?)

GOVERNMENT PATRONAGE: RELYING ON THE TAXPAYER

• How a lot of libraries and archives survive! One of the only remaining ways to achieve ongoing support if you’re not selling things.•Though crowdfunding may gradually be changing this...

• Salutary for us to ask ourselves “what does it mean to be a civic institution?”

• But also has its issues (e.g. “community standards”) and conflicts (law vs. ethics)

BIG QUESTION FOR LIBRARIES:

DO WE OFFER PATRONAGE TOO?SHOULD WE? IN WHAT FORMS?

LIBRARY PATRONAGE WE’VE SEEN• Author talks (yes, really! think about it; it’s usually

indirect support, but it counts)• Open access

•Support here usually in-kind, but occasionally straight-up $$$. If you ask me, I think that balance needs to tilt quite a bit more in favor of straight-up $$$.

• Open textbooks/OER• Library-as-publisher/self-publishing support• Supporting community organizations in publishing and

broadcasting

SOMETHING TO NOTICE:WHERE MONEY FOR PATRONAGE COMES FROM

• It’s almost NEVER the collections/acquisitions budget.•Events/programs, IT, “gift funds,” whatever.•But ask a collection developer for money for the cultural commons

and hear “talk to the hand.”

• What is this? Billions of dollars for Big Deals, not one cent for open access?•Well, yes. Lots of reasons. One is that our patrons are selfish, also

stuck in library-as-wallet thinking. Scary and hard to budge them!•Another is that for all the talk of change, the library that dies with

the biggest collection STILL wins.

• Go ye forth into the library world and FIX THIS, please.•Leslie Chan: “1% solution”

OPTION: GRANTS FROM PHILANTHROPIC ORGANIZATIONS

• Extending patronage “beyond the grave”• Or a governance mechanism for those with money

uninterested in doing the governing themselves• Notorious problems: time-finite, high-overhead,

sometimes low-accountability, sometimes too-high or misaimed accountability

BASIC TRUTH:

THERE’S MORE THAN ONE WAY TO DO IT.

CROWDFUNDING

WHAT IS CROWDFUNDING?• Asking for up-front donations from many people toward

a defined project, product, or purpose.•The Internet makes this a lot easier than it used to be, especially

for individuals.•Until recently, similar to grants in that it’s one-time-only funding.

• Many crowdfunded projects involve some kind of cultural production that never could have been funded this way before!•Issue brief coming; I won’t stomp on it.

WHAT IS CROWDFUNDING NOT?

• A magic bullet• Easy money

•Just keeping track of all the premiums is tough!

• An automatic democratization of culture funding•It helps, sure. The rich aren’t calling the whole tune!•Doesn’t fix that some people just plain have more disposable

income than others, and therefore have disproportionate impact on what gets funded.

COULD LIBRARIES BE CROWDFUNDED? CROWDFUND OTHER THINGS?

• Maybe.•A lot would depend on whether legal and policy structures permit it. I don’t

have any insight on this point; I don’t know libraries that have tried this!•Also, there’s a danger: “they don’t need taxes; The Crowd will fund them!”

• Remember, this is usually project money, not ongoing money.•You can’t easily fund (e.g.) permanent staff this way! It’s just like cobbling

together grants.

• Could we use library money on crowdfunded projects?•We’d have to check policy, again... but there’s that cultural issue, too.•Librarians think of acquisitions as things bought for their specific patron

base. Many crowdfunded projects (not all, as some produce saleable objects, but many) wind up with open results.

•So, are librarians ready/willing to fund open? Under what circumstances? With what consultation with patrons?

PAYING FOR SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

WHO ARE THE PEOPLE WITH MONEY IN THIS SYSTEM?

• Individual purchasers of books and journals•Scholarly-society wrinkle: society journal as membership perq

• Libraries• Universities themselves (distinct from their libraries)• Research funders

HOW WE’VE BEEN DOING IT

• We buy physical things.•This used to be the entirety of what we did in this system!

• We lease access to electronic things.• Note that there’s a huge implicit subsidy of the system

here! There’s money! We, yes WE, have money!• We could theoretically use this money to shift the

system. As discussed... we largely haven’t.

HOW CAN OA BE PAID FOR?• Depends on color, to an extent.• Green OA

•Running repositories, institutional or disciplinary (arXiv is run by Cornell University Library, with money from many libraries). Funders can do this, too, and have (e.g. PubMed Central).

•Remember the university-press trap! Depending solely on your host institution for subsidies means you die if they yank funding.

•DO NOT BE AN IDIOT ABOUT COSTS. Running a repository is not “free.” It’s not even cheap; repos that cheap out fail.

•Staff and technology cost. Content recruitment especially costs! (And a mandate is not a silver bullet here!)

•In open-data circles, there’s some venture capital sloshing around. We’ll see how that plays out; I’m not sanguine.

PAYING FOR GOLD• In-kind support

•e.g. library-based journal hosting services•DO NOT BE AN IDIOT ABOUT COSTS and workflows. Some

faculty know how to do a shoestring journal. Most don’t, and they’ll look to a library service to do or subsidize such things as editing and typesetting/file conversion.

• “Author-side” fees•Often paid by research funder rather than author•Some libraries have author-side fee funds for gold OA. (Again,

these are almost never from the actual materials budget! At UW-Madison they were from unrestricted gift funds.)

•Still a great deal of faculty concern about “vanity publishing,” publishing only available to wealthy scholars.

A THING I HEARD ONCE

• Virulently anti-OA publisher representative• “We’ll follow the money,” he said. “If the money moves

to OA, so will we.”• Insofar as libraries are not moving money to OA, we are

complicit in the toll-access system.•Maybe we’re okay with that (many of us are!), maybe we’re

not. We don’t get to look away from it, however.

BEATING THE PRESTIGE GAME• Every time I see a librarian or LibGuide that reinforces

Journal Impact Factor, I want to cry.•We know the system is dysfunctional; why advertise it?

• Insofar as we direct faculty and student eyeballs, why do we not direct them to OA?•(Cultural reason we don’t: professional heuristics for “quality”

materials that privilege materials libraries pay for.)•Some savvy academic libraries have discovered that adding OA

searching to ILL workflows can save time and money.

• Eating our own dog food• Refusing to be silent. Or silenced.

CROWDSOURCING

WHAT IS CROWDSOURCING?

• Humans and computers differ in the tasks they’re good at.• Some large-scale tasks can’t be done by computers, but

are too vast to be done by one or a few human beings.• These kinds of tasks are good crowdsourcing candidates.

•Classifying galaxies (GalaxyZoo)•Transcribing handwritten manuscripts (many, many projects, some

of them library-based)•Making an encyclopedia!

WHY CROWDSOURCE?

• Because the work can’t get done any other way• Because all of us are smarter than any of us

•We see this in libraries/archives with metadata crowdsourcing, crowdsourced current-history collecting online.

• To ENGAGE PEOPLE and COMMUNITIES in the work you do.•Yes, crowdsourcing is an outreach tool!

WHY NOT CROWDSOURCE?

• If you’re just thinking “woo! free labor!” please stop.•That’s exploitation, and exploitation is not cool.•Figure out what you’re giving back, not just what you’re getting.•Not to mention that volunteer-herding is real work!

• Because you have a driving need to be The Expert•Honestly, this is what stops a lot of libraries and archives from

crowdsourcing: a sense that Only We Can Possibly Do It Right.•I have zero patience for this. It is condescending nonsense.•Trolls, spammers, griefers can be worked around; don’t let that

stop you.

LIBRARIES AS PUBLISHERSone form of the “makerspace” movement

WHO’S DOING THIS?• Academic libraries

•Journal-hosting services (though to be honest, a lot of these are half-assed and unsupported)

•Library imprints (e.g. Parallel Press here, UNebraska)•Repository-as-“publisher” (usually of gray literature)

• Public libraries•“Micropublishing” (local-interest publishing)•Facilitating self-publishing

• Archives•large ones may have publishing imprints of their own

WHY ARE WE DOING IT?• Because other libraries are, or some pundit told them

they had to•This is the worst reason ever to do anything! Lemming services

rarely work out well. No fire in anybody’s belly!

• To diversify the world of published information•On any number of fronts! This is partly a social-justice issue.

Libraries have historically smoothed out differential access to information; can we now smooth out differential access to making oneself heard?

• To fix perceived problems in current publishing systems• To serve one or more demonstrable patron needs

HOW DOES THIS CHANGE LIBRARIES?• Historically, we have facilitated information

consumption. What people made or did with that information was largely outside our purview.

• Dilution of our assessment/QA function?• We’re used to buying stuff, for our patrons specifically.

Can we become collective actors, buying for the entire world, instead?•The alternative, as we’ve seen, is free-riding.

I AMAR PRESTAR AEN.BUT WE CAN CHANGE THE WORLD, TOO.

AND CHANGE WITH IT.

• This presentation is available under a Creative Commons Attribution United States 4.0 license.