It has been nearly two years since the Maritime Librarian posted a blog on “What the library can do for WMU Alumni.” The answer at the time, basically, was not that much. The answer now is not much more. We will not recount the reasons for this, as they are the same as they were two years ago.
The experiences gained since then convince us that What the Alumni Can do for the Library is a better place to start. We can achieve next to nothing if WMU graduates expect to be passive recipients of the bounty of maritime information they enjoyed as students. Given the issues of copyright fees, contractual authorizations, and IT infrastructure that must be addressed to provide this growing and global community of users with remote online access to maritime information, the WMU alumni need to be actively assisting in the creation of their own library services. To paraphrase the famous line from the movie Jerry McGuire, we need you to “help us help you”
The help we need is in three three forms. Most obviously, we need money. Databases such as Ebrary and i-Law charge the library by headcount. If the headcount goes up beyond the number of current students and faculty, we can expect to be charged more. However, as in any other business, purchasing in bigger bulk usually translates to a lower cost per unit, i.e., a lower cost per user. As this information is not free for the library, it can not be made free for alumni, but if members were willing to pay a fee, at cost, access would at least be cheaper than what individual members would have to pay on their own.
This brings me to the second form of assistance, participation in a consortium of maritime libraries. Those of you who are returning to work in maritime colleges more than likely already have a library. If a global network of such libraries were to join in a formal association of libraries, we can bargain collectively for even greater cost reductions. If you are a member of such an institution, you can access whatever your library has rights to, including what we will have collectively purchased. If you do not work at an educational institution, you might be able to convince your organization to set up an office "library." This would require complying with a few formalities, and designating at least one person in the office to perform part´time duties as "librarian," but an office in your organization meeting the minimum qualifications of a library could be granted consortium membership with the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.
A library consortium would not only have the advantage of leveraging better prices in collective purchasing, but would allow for expedited interlibrary loans and the scanning of articles, chapters and documents via a digital delivery system among participating "libraries." We could also share discovery services, aggregating our joint holdings into one catalog, on one server, having only one point of maintenance, and allowing patrons at one organization to search the collections of all and to request items that are not available on the local library shelves to be delivered or scanned from another participating library.
A further benefit is sharing the burden of cataloging. The description of books and articles, the assignment of proper author and subject headings, is time consuming work for libraries, but a consortium has the benefit of needing only one catalog record that can be used by all organizations. Consortial cataloging multiplies the number of titles that could be cataloged for the whole group. This would allow, for instance, one library to catalog the individual articles in an issue of Fairplay, while another library catalogs the articles in American Shipper. Neither of these journals are currently cataloged at the article level, which means if a patron does not already know the issue that a given article was published in, he or she will not be able to search for it in anyone's catalog. Cooperative cataloging is one means of addressing this shortfall in maritime research.
The phenomenon of cooperative data entry, sometimes called crowdsourcing, is the third form of assistance that alumni could contribute. It has applications extending far beyond what specialist in library cataloging would be expected to undertake, and has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of maritime information.
What sort of costs are we talking about? Last year, the library paid £1200 for the Drewry Manning Report. Drewry was considerate enough to let us share the PDF in-house among faculty and students, and the report is 90 pages full of good information routinely needed for MSc studies and faculty research. But is it really worth twelve hundred British Pounds? It features nice editorial summaries and graphs, but do such enhancements justify the £13 per page that Drewry is asking? I would rather have access to the raw columns and rows and come to my own conclusions and make my own graphs, if it means I can get the information more cheaply.
The same goes for the Casualty Statistics we purchase annually from IHS -- €750 for a year's worth of summary data in a spreadsheet. We are of course paying for the work required to collect this information and apply the spreadsheet functions needed to break this information down by collision type, vessel type, location of accident, flag, etc., but with the raw data we could make these calculations for ourselves as well as a great deal more of our own devising.
We buy a four volume port guide accompanied by a CD-ROM disc every other year because we can't afford to buy it annually. Fortunately, the contact, approach and capacity information don't change much from year to year, but unlike with the online database version, it only takes one change in one port to render these volumes, and the CD, technically out of date. Unfortunately, the online version costs even more than the print version, despite the publisher not having to bear the cost for printing, binding, warehousing or transportation.
And where does the data for these publications come from but you, the professionals in the maritime sector? The big name publishers send you questionnaires that you dutifully fill out and return, and after all the forms have been collated, analyzed and summarized, they offer to sell you their results. Think on this: Your own data is being sold back to you at the highest price that the market will bear. This is the very definition of Information Colonialism, and like all forms of colonialism, the primary beneficiaries are the colonists who own the finished product and not the native population that does the heavy work of collecting the raw materials.
And this is where the alumni can help with crowdsourcing. While maritime librarians can apply their special skills in describing and categorizing content for online retrieval, the maritime practitioner can provide the raw data to be stored in online databases and made available for querying by anyone with the interest and an internet connection. There are still costs involved, but with the middlemen cut out of the process, they are not nearly as great. Imagine generating up-to-date, comprehensive statistics on a web site sustained by online advertising, or by a small membership fee, or by modest contributions from organizational sponsors with an interest in the public good. Individually, none of you have the complete information to make such databases, but collectively, as a crowd, you are tapped into a network of maritime information with the potential to strike a serious blow at the publishing overlords and their beyond-the-pale pricing.
As I hope to have made clear by these illustrations, a purposeful and cohesive alumni association is critical to the success of extending access to the maritime information many of you want the WMU library to provide. For monographic books and journal articles, there is the simple reality of having to pay for the extra readership. A consortium of libraries --libraries that can be established within organizations even if they are not academic organizations-- can assist in collective bargaining with publishers and information aggregators, and alumni will need to help establish and connect these libraries to our maritime information network. And finally, the very information generated by your place of business has value that should not just be handed over to traditional publishing houses. As alumni belonging to a global network of maritime professionals, you are in a unique position to spot opportunities and manage crowdsourcing projects. The library can host the data and make it available at the lowest possible cost, which ultimately translates into our ability to offer more services to alumni.
A nice symbiosis. The library looks forward to working with the alumni, but further progress requires an alumni association to do its part.
In other words, help us help you.
