Vancouver, British Columbia
May 15-17, 1996

Leading the Agile Organization

Program Session III: Question and Answer Session

MR. FRAZIER (University of Wisconsin): I have a couple of questions, but first a quick comment. We've talked a lot about our rights and responsibilities under copyright law and have heard a number of perspectives, but I would like to just mention that there is also the power of the marketplace. It's in our power to say "yes" or "no." I believe we need to purchase your product as you make it available and also to encourage those enterprises that are sympathetic to the overall mission of academia.

Two questions. One, I'm on the board of the University of Wisconsin Press and we have a dozen journals. Jim, can you tell us how to do it? That is, without Mellon funds.

Question two: Carol, can you tell us how we can begin to move into producing monographs in electronic form, perhaps with the intermediate stage of creating an infrastructure that would support publication on demand as we prepare to move ahead towards accessing monographs electronically?

MR. NEAL: I think that Project MUSE would be very interested in distributing journal titles from the University of Wisconsin Press. We have had regular visits from university presses looking at MUSE as a model, and I think that a visit would be very helpful for you. It has the value of not only educating and raising awareness, but it also has practical value from looking at some of the difficulties we have had and from direct conversation with the staff.

Certainly, a growing subscription base for these types of projects, which have favorable intellectual property fair use support, can have an influence in the larger market. I believe it has had an influence already. The ways some of the commercial journal producers are marketing their electronic versions reflect some of the thinking that has gone on in MUSE-type initiatives in terms of owning what you subscribe to, not always linking print and electronic subscriptions together, and enabling on-campus use and reuse of the information. So I think we're having an impact, but I also believe that these kinds of projects need to be successful both economically and scholastically.

MR. EKMAN: Let me put a footnote on Jim's answer. It is true that the start-up was externally subsidized by a Mellon grant, but the proposal included a business plan that called for a break-even point in this operation within four years. As Jim reported, things are going even faster than expected in getting the journals mounted and one can assume that this will begin to at least cover its costs fairly rapidly.

MS. MANDEL: Actually, I think that Sue really addressed some of the issues related to your question in terms of having a database of monographic information that can be published on demand. What we're dealing with now is legacy systems.

One of the reasons our start-up was so long is that publishers who blithely told us that they had been producing things electronically for ages and could give us electronic publications kept telling us every year, "Well, we'll start with our 1993 stuff. Oh, you know, we'll start with our 1994 imprints. Oh, you know --," and this went on. That's why we have as few books from Simon & Schuster as we do. It's a combination of what they can produce, what kind of typesetters' tapes they actually have, and also what kind of rights agreements they signed.

So we have to decide when prospective "day one" is. We are now taking any tape we can get, and you wouldn't believe the exorbitant prices that production houses want to charge for retrieving these tapes. We are struggling with these tapes, and we are looking at 95 imprints, and some94 imprints. It's very hard to go back further. We then need to figure out what the product ought to look like.

Then we get to the point of needing to invest in a whole different production system in which you create your books as databases, not as tapes that were used to produce print, and then you can publish on demand. We're a ways away from that because conversion is a big investment. Further, the SGML question is very difficult for publishers because right now the web browsers are using HTML instead of SGML. So there is a lot that needs done before we're at that prospective moment when the raw material to produce on demand is available. I think you may want to discuss this with Sue, because that's just what Sue was talking about.

MR. CAMPBELL (University of Southern California): In these endeavors, we continue to use the language of articles and books and it seems likely that those are related to some degree to the physical characteristics of paper publishing.

Is it possible that it would be helpful if we abandoned those labels, because they don't particularly suit the flexibility, particularly given links and so forth, of the digitized environment? But we continue to use print metaphors that need not be there for any physical reason.

MS. MANDEL: Well, in a sense, when we use the term "book," we're referring to the thing that was and leaving it open as to the thing that will be.

I think, though, that terms like "scholarly monograph" or "article" do have content meaning and not just form meaning because they're units of thought, intellectual production. So that's something we may want to experiment with.

But, certainly, when I use the term "book" at this point I really do mean the package you throw at the cat and not the content.

MR. NEAL: I think we're using those conventions now to a large extent because of the conversion nature of what we're doing. I also think there is a political value in using some of these familiar conventions because it enables publishers and faculty, researchers in particular, to identify with what we're doing and to develop a higher level of comfort.

MR. EKMAN: That was certainly an issue in the retrospective project that we're involved in, the JSTOR project; having something that looks like the familiar journal was a crucial consideration.

MS. ROSENBLATT: When we're looking prospectively at publishing monographs online we are calling them books to give a sort of traditional trajectory to what we're doing. But we're trying to look more at the functionality, the kinds of issues that Carol was talking about. Because it's true, except in a literary or expository work, people are not reading seriatum from page one to page whatever.

So the presentation that we think might work, while still giving a user the feeling of a book online, is to look at the chapter as analogous to an article and providing abstracts that relate to chapters. There would also be a hierarchical browsing approach that could lead the user from the abstracts to the particular chapters. This would also have marketing appeal in that the abstracts could be accessed for free and then entice the user into subscribing to the monograph or bits of the monograph from particular chapters; paying by the drink rather than by the entire monograph.

I think that our rhetoric will change as we actually change the form online and as we have a better understanding of how people use this information that we formerly packaged into a book.

MS. VON WAHLDE (State University of New York-Buffalo): I wanted to say that I was extremely excited to hear about these projects. The presentations were all very informative and I hope there will be opportunities to learn more about them in greater detail and depth over time.

MR. EKMAN: Well, I think I can promise you that for any project we've been supporting there will be periodic reports, increasingly solid evidence of the success or lack thereof of the various project elements. Thank you to our speakers for excellent presentations.