0.23 Perpetual stewardship: comments on penelope kaiserlian’s paper  (Page 4/5)

The lifetime cost of preserving an electronic record with equivalent content to a print book is much less. The electronic version is cheaper to access and “re-shelve,” takes up much less space, no more power (servers are expensive to run, but heating and cooling large buildings is even more expensive). But the time pattern of outlays to support the housing of printed books is episodic, the annual costs are folded into the general cost of running the library, and, perhaps most important, these costs are not new—libraries have learned to absorb them. Although librarians and provosts pay attention to the cost of housing their collections, they tend to view new print acquisitions as assets rather than liabilities, and there is rarely explicit consideration of the ongoing stream of future expenditures that come with a new print book. An electronic book, on the other hand, makes those future costs immediately visible, and thus looks relatively more expensive even though it is actually cheaper. Kaiserlian’s observation that someone has to be concerned about the implications of perpetual stewardship is just as true for print as for electronic resources. The difference is that with print “someone” is always the library, and the implications of perpetual stewardship, however financially unpleasant, are familiar and are already, at least implicitly, in the budget. I don’t mean to pretend that print storage is seen as costless. Provosts and librarians have powerful interests in reducing the cost of holding print collections, via shared repositories, offsite storage, deduplication (especially for bound journals with electronic backfiles.) But everyone starts from a presumption that they will find the money necessary to preserve the print record, building on a long tradition of having done so. There is no such tradition for the annual costs involved in maintaining digital books.

Differences due to tedious and intolerable behavior on the part of benighted journal editors who are loathe to review digital scholarship

At several points in her paper, Kaiserlian notes that it is difficult to get academic journals to review the electronic editions of scholarly works published by Rotunda Press. Sadly, her lament is not unique to Rotunda. The best explanation for this sort of behavior that I have heard is that in the print world the reviewer gets to keep a copy of the book, whereas in the digital world there is no similarly valued artifact that can be used in lieu of an appropriate bribe or honorarium. If this is the reason, perhaps we should give vouchers good for a box full of printed works from the relevant press, or perhaps gift certificates from a museum shop. If the reason is instead some notion that because things are digital they are less scholarly than if not, then some set of mechanisms should be developed to hold the journal editors up to public ridicule.

No good purpose is served when academics use arbitrary screening devices to determine what is worth reviewing and what is not. Indeed, I would argue that even nonarbitrary devices, particularly the reputation of presses and journals, are overused in making material decisions that affect academic careers, but that is a topic for another discussion. In the case at hand, the works carry the imprimatur of a distinguished press, and the associated peer review, so the refusal of journals to review digital products makes no sense at all. Of course, it may be the case that a traditional review in a print journal cannot do justice to the electronic work, but if that is the case, the print journals could create quite simple websites with the requisite functionality, and explain to their readers how to use them. (The M-Publishing Group at the University of Michigan Library would be glad to help.)