0.23 Perpetual stewardship: comments on penelope kaiserlian’s paper

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The story of the Rotunda Press (so far) leaves us pleased with what digital publishing can do and less pleased with how difficult it seems to be to do it well (which is to say handsomely, reliably, permanently, economically, expeditiously, and openly, for a start). In the first paragraph, Kaiserlian adduces “a special responsibility …to find ways to ‘cherish and preserve’” the Rotunda editions of the papers of the Founding Fathers and also a responsibility to “confront the implications of perpetual stewardship.” Traditionally, libraries, rather than publishers, have been on the front lines with respect to preservation (even cherishing) and confronting the implications of perpetual stewardship. Access and preservation of published works were inseparable, bound together (literally) in the codex itself, with libraries taking full responsibility for published works once they obtained legal title to them, which was also the moment when publishers’ responsibilities terminated. With digital technologies, the provision of access and preservation can be and often are separated, and the library’s role is much reduced in both. The library typically acts as an agent for current and future access, rather than a direct provider, and the means by which it attempts to provide perpetual stewardship is contractual rather than via the exercise of physical control. Similarly, the publisher is often called upon to provide its current digital products into the indefinite future—a novel task for publishers.

From the outset, then, Kaiserlian’s paper invites the reader (or at least this reader, who is responsible for both a library and a university press) to think about the relationships between publishers and libraries, and the differences in their views of what is involved in providing reliable, permanent access to scholarship and scholarly resources. As with many current discussions of digital publishing and scholarship, Kaiserlian combines enthusiasm for what the technology can do (and does) with wistfulness about the simplicities of the good old days of print. It’s not that Kaiserlian would go back to a print-only world, far from it. It’s just that the world we live in somehow makes difficult many things that used to at least appear to be relatively easy.

Kaiserlian begins her excellent section, “Some Lessons Learned” (p.15), with the observation, “Some of the things that surprised us may be well known to journals publishers and librarians, but not to these novices from the world of print.” This observation provides the organizing question for much of what I have to say: What are the essential differences between electronic and print publication that matter for research libraries and academic publishers? The key characteristic of research libraries in this context is that they are expected to provide approximately permanent access to both scholarly works and source materials that are deemed important for scholarly work. Why do both publishers and libraries find the digital world to be so difficult? Let me count some of the ways.