that’s audio file, not ‘audiophile’: an archives ingestion emergency

I recently got some music at my favorite place, Roadside Records. That is, I found some records waiting for trash pick-up on the side of the road. The pile included over 100 LPs and about forty 45-rpm singles. I recognized a lot of artists from the 1970s and ‘80s.

They were sitting in front of a self-storage place and had apparent water damage, but I stuffed them into the car and brought them home to see if any were worth keeping. Fortunately, my wife was out of town for a few days. I had space to spread out and do triage. I started with the 45s.

These had been stored in a open plastic rack, most with their paper sleeves. After sitting outside, none of the sleeves was stable, so I discarded each as I removed the disk. But because the disks had been well-maintained until going to the curb, all but three were still playable, with most in rather good condition. I threw out the three broken disks, set aside the remaining 35, and moved on to the LPs. I ended up digitizing most of the singles and keeping fourteen of them.

The albums were more of a challenge. While the singles had been stacked, in their rack, on another piece of furniture outside the facility, the large cardboard box of LPs was resting directly on the ground and moisture had seeped through. Several of the albums were ‘protected’, either by their original cellophane wrapper or an aftermarket protective sleeve. And while this layer of exterior protection did help stave off the worst of an overnight out of doors, it ultimately caused much bigger problems.

The first step, then, was to remove the sleeve and retail cellophane and extract the object. Next, I examined the package, hoping the cardboard sleeve was in good shape. If so, I wiped it with a microfiber cloth before removing the next layer. Sometimes, though, water damage caused the cardboard to fall apart in my hands. Even worse, the combination of moisture and sealed environment in their rental storage space had sprouted mold colonies inside many of the record wrappers. A good number had to be discarded immediately, and the damage was so severe between (alphabetically) Pat Benatar and Neil Diamond that nineteen albums were beyond any salvage.

So I’ve set aside or discarded the cover jacket, and now have the disk in hand. It may be in a paper or plastic internal protective sleeve. If so, the sleeve comes off and, unless it is printed original album art, immediately goes in the trash. The mold potential outweighs any protective value. Liner art goes to sit with the jacket, though, for attention later. Now we’re down to the vinyl sound disk.

Now for a quick visual inspection, aided by a microfiber cloth. First, is the album intact? The LPs all were, but one of the singles had been discarded because of cracks. Next, is it clean? Here, the real value of plastic sleeves showed. Album jackets with outer plastic wraps developed mold. Albums with inner plastic sleeves might also develop mold on the cardboard, but if so, the important part - the sound-carrying vinyl - was separated from that mold. Inner plastic sleeves meant clean records. Records with paper sleeves, or loose in the cardboard, came into direct contact with the mold and required additional attention.

Now I’ve got a stack of records that might be playable. The question after ‘can we’ is ‘should we’; this is the fun part. Going through the stack, it’s easy to eliminate records I’ll never want to hear, much less own. A total of 87 albums ended up playable. Most of those, like Greatest Hits from Elton John, The Eagles, and Air Supply, were easy. The music is easy to find, and the records themselves have no historic significance as objects. I guiltily slipped these records back into their sleeves, if those remained intact, and returned them to curb, hoping both that someone else would give the music a home, and that the records would not spread mold if they did find another taker.

My stack of material to process greatly reduced, I confronted my final question: use, or archival? I now had about thirty albums which were at least interesting enough to digitize in part. But while all would need cleaning before that, some might be worth keeping, meaning extra attention for them. I decided to deal with those after ripping the music I wanted to keep from albums I wouldn't and adding those records to my curbside pile.

Cleaning vinyl is a lost art. When records were the best media for music, everyone had supplies for their care. But MP3 files don’t need cleaning, CDs are usually okay without attention, and most of us don’t have purpose-made record care equipment now. While special solutions are available, I checked my textbooks and realized that pure isopropyl alcohol works just fine. Gently using a cotton pad to go around the disk, this removed decades of dust and, in almost every case, any trace of mold from the grooves.

Finally, we’re ready to convert the sound from analog encoding to a digital file, making it much more practical and portable. I use a convenient tool, the Profile Pro USB Turntable with Input. It’s an inexpensive device and the results aren’t great, but it is for a use copy, after all. I make one take, save it as a WAV.file, and import the track into iTunes. I should make more of an effort with the sound quality, but if I want to hear something in its full glory, I’ll put it on the stereo, not my iPod. That’s why I keep some things as archival copies. I digitized well over 250 songs.

But only nine disks from this stack of 115 LPs made it into my physical collection. Some things I thought might be worth hearing, were not. Some that were, weren’t worth keeping. Of the final nine, only four were complete with jackets. Those four were cleaned against mold as well as I could without causing too much additional damage.

This leaves just the cataloging and filing, which we all do differently. Now that it’s over, I’ve learned a few things. Some are mechanical. Plastic sleeves are bad for jackets, but good the the records. Microfiber cloth is great for a quick preliminary cleaning of both jacket and disk, and common isopropyl alcohol works well for cleaning the grooves. Mold really is that much of a threat. Digitization produces better results with more care and attention. This all just confirms in practice what we know in theory.

But I also now understand that archival donations are expensive. Time, both in staff and opportunity costs, is the issue: this project took about three weeks of spare time. The ingestion process, the ‘can we’, ‘should we’, ‘will we’ questions, takes time. Conservation - restoration and preservation - takes time. Processing for use; cataloging, arranging, building finding aids; so much work to describe an item, that others might find and make use of it. Historical significance and uniqueness are important, but so are these two questions: ‘does anyone want to use it’, and ‘can we afford it’. If either of those answers is ‘no’, it might be best to politely decline most material offered for archival donation. But I'll still stop at Roadside Records, every chance I get.

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Marie Kondo, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up Berkeley, Ten Speed Press, 2014.

What gives you joy? That is what you should do, and what you should have. It determines what you should buy. Keeping tidy is easy: eliminate that which does not give you joy (an excellent argument for divorce, as well). Books are among the most difficult items to let go, because they 1) retain function and 2) contain information, giving them long shelf-life. They retain ‘value’, and the potential for joy, very well. But do you love this individual volume enough to keep it forever?

Among more than fifty paperbacks that didn’t make it are Tolkien, Steinbeck, Conrad, Kipling, Freud, Herman Hesse, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry James: cheap classics, most of which can be had from Project Gutenberg if ever wanted again. That leaves only 1200 or so to disappear en route to Kondo’s ideal collection size of between thirty and one hundred volumes.

Yeah, books are hard to let go.

[cross-posted at www.whateverettreads.blogspot.com/]

Marketing Practices

Once upon a time, legal publishers made their money by selling books. That all changed when databases became everyone's preferred means of accessing information, but publishers were loath to let go of that print-based income. This sometimes led to innovative marketing techniques among some publishing firms. What follows is my response to an unsolicited delivery from one of these.

Fortunately, I have not seen this sort of nonsense in several years. Let's hope letters like this aren't needed again.

8 June, 2009

Dear Customer Service Department,

Please refer your marketing staff to the following website, which describes the approved vendor practices of the American Association of Law Librarians (which comprises your primary market):

http://www.aallnet.org/about/fair_practice_guide.asp

Principle 3: Fair Dealing. Publishers should engage in fair dealings with their customers.

3.1 Customer consent. Publishers should obtain the customer's consent prior to making a shipment or initiating a transaction, unless such shipment is part of a standing order or subscription to which the customer has previously consented.

3.1 PRACTICE TO AVOID 1: Without prior customer consent, a publisher mass mails a new product to customers who have previously purchased an existing product.

3.1 PRACTICE TO AVOID 2: Without prior customer consent, a publisher ships a free unsolicited newsletter to a customer and then later sends an invoice for the title to the customer.

3.1(a) Where the content of a new product or supplement that is published as part of an existing subscription or standing order bears no direct relationship to the content of the standing order or represents a substantial expansion of the topic or purpose of the original subscription or product, the publisher should seek customer consent prior to shipment.

3.1(a) PRACTICE TO AVOID: Without prior customer consent, the publisher of a subscription service ships to subscribers of the service a pamphlet that includes content that has not previously been supplied as part of the subscription, where that content is not specific or closely related to the topic of the service, and charges customers for the pamphlet.

3.1(b) Where a new product or supplement is published as an addition to more than one existing title or subscription, the publisher should seek customer consent prior to shipment.

We are returning the unsolicited supplement received 5 May 2009 for the following reasons:

1)         Said item is deceptively packaged as part of a series--a subscription service.  Such materials are assumed by the customer to be part of the service for which we have already paid.

2)         Said item does not list a price, anywhere.  In fact, the packing slip--like all other subscription updates--indicates Total: $***** .  This is also deceptive, as the statement 'Invoiced Separately' again echoes other subscription updates--which are, of course, invoiced upon subscription, rather than when the updates are supplied.

3)         Said item is shipped in brown paper.  All documents except the deceptive packing slip described in 2) are packaged INSIDE this brown paper.  These documents, then, instruct that if item is to be returned, it must be shipped in the packaging which was NECESSARILY DESTROYED in locating the documents.  If not deceptive, this is certainly disingenuous.  We are of course ignoring your request to return the item in its original packaging.

While this shipment may not violate the letter of the American Association of Law Librarian's vendor guidelines (though I would argue that it most certainly does), it is clearly an effort to SELL an item for which no real market exists by making it seem like part of a series for which we have already paid, not providing the price of the material, and then making its return more difficult than paying for the unwanted item.

Such vendor practices are entirely unethical.  If one must resort to deception to sell one's wares, one ought leave that business immediately.

Sincerely,

Everett Wiggins

Reference Librarian

Deselection, again

Originally published in ALLUNY Newsletter (39.1),
http://www.aallnet.org/chapter/alluny/2014-01spring.pdf

In my last column, I wrote about the law library as a social space.  Before that was even published, I got word that not only would we not be getting comfortable chairs, we would be moving the library to a much smaller space.  This is a drastic, but reasonable, change for our firm.

A law firm library is unlike other law libraries.  We collect for a specific purpose—to support the practices of our attorneys—rather than in a comprehensive way.  History does matter, but not much: for what isn’t available through our database subscriptions, we rely on others, with more archival missions, to collect.  And finally, we are subject to the profit motive.  This isn’t to suggest that the library is a profit center, but we must be mindful that our space costs money, our books cost money, multiple copies of books costs even more money, and our databases allow for billing back usage costs to clients.

My job as a private law firm librarian is to provide timely access to accurate information in the most convenient, cost-effective way possible.  With multiple offices across several states, that means databases.  They are updated immediately, allow multiple concurrent users, and don’t require multiple copies for each office.

So the management committee has determined that our space can be better utilized as additional offices and conference rooms.  Our new space would be approximately one-third the current arrangement, and this would allow far fewer materials to be shelved.  I needed to begin culling my collection immediately.

Some of the decisions were easy.  Most of the deselected items hadn’t circulated for at least five years, and many hadn’t been updated in that time.  Large sets, like the NYCRR, which 1) cost a lot to maintain, 2) take lots of space, 3) are available for free online, and 4) can never be truly current, were among the first to go—along with shelves and shelves of New York case reporters that were housed in the basement.  Old hornbooks, outdated treatises, and back issues of periodicals were next.  The US Code and FCR, both available from the GPO website, freed another full run of shelves.  Digests, the NY Juror 2d, and a second set of McKinney’s Consolidated Laws also disappeared.  All told, the books we discarded left a stack of circulation cards nearly six inches high.

What did we keep?  Practice materials, mostly. Treatises, formbooks, and specialized case reporters from CCH. Historical material that is otherwise not online, like our Session Laws, Attorney General opinions, and Comptroller opinions collections. Local laws. Titles directly related to our current practice areas, or with particular enduring value. And some not available from our database provider because they’re published by the other vendor.

I am a librarian by trade, and an archivist by nature.  Tossing thousands of dollars into a dumpster is not my idea of fun, but I am better positioned to make these choices than anyone else in the firm.  I  know what materials we have online; I know what materials my attorneys actually use (as opposed to what they SAY they use); I know that keeping dated materials on the shelf so the shelf looks full will tempt one of them to use it without checking its currency, leaving him open to malpractice.  Clearing these shelves is an extinction event: the books are gone, and there is no bringing them back. Our library is now, of necessity, a lean, mean, internet using system, and our attorneys will need to adjust. On a more positive note, though, all that free shelf space has allowed me to start a DVD lending collection—so even in a reduced space, more people have reason to visit the new library.

eBooks

Originally published in the ALLUNY Newsletter 38.1, March 2013

We recently received a copy of the latest Federal Security Laws of Municipal Bonds Deskbook.  But wait, there’s more! With each pBook (short for Physical Book or, for our purposes, ‘book’), the publisher also includes a FREE copy of the title as an eBook!  Which is nice, I suppose, but actually pretty useless to us in the library, unless I missed the Kindle packed in that box.

First, I have to point out that I like eBooks.  My iPad is full of free literature from Project Gutenberg, as well as beautiful eBooks from the Metropolitan Museum and NASA.  eBooks are easily portable, making it easy to carry a reference collection into any setting; they can do very interesting, otherwise impossible things, like bring in video files or interactive features like making notes or linking out to supplemental material; they can be (and are) instantly updated when new content becomes available.  I understand the benefits eBooks offer.

But for libraries, eBooks pose problems and do not offer solutions.  For starters, how do I lend an eBook?  The FREE copy I ‘received’ is device-specific: it can be downloaded to a single, particular electronic reader.  Where is the device to which it is to be downloaded?  That’s something we must supply, of course—meaning that, instead of a FREE copy, we must buy an expensive toy to use our material, which we can then lend.   eBooks are actually less valuable to us than database access to the same treatise titles, since our contract allows unlimited access, simultaneous access, and distributed access, as needed.

Perhaps we would prefer to keep our copy on a central server, to ‘check out’ or lend to various patrons as required, the way we would check out a print copy.  This is how eBooks work in public libraries; while that system still has obvious problems, such as arbitrary publisher limits on how often a copy may circulate, it is much closer to a usable model for libraries than the prior paragraph.  It also begins to consider an answer to the second problem eBooks present: how do I archive the material for future reference?

Oh, wait.  No one cares about archiving now, so being able to permanently retain a format-neutral copy on our in-house system doesn’t matter, does it?  Who would keep a print copy on the shelf, after all?  How could that ever be useful?

In addition to long-term preservation, books have an advantage as discrete physical objects that can be disaggregated from the collection and used individually, simultaneously, and in various locations.  They are easy to study, and to lend, as parts rather than as a whole: no one monopolized the entire collection by borrowing a volume of the NY Jur 2d.

In short, the benefits of eBooks accrue to two groups, neither of which is the library: the convenience and productivity features benefit eBook readers, while their potential for high profit margins thanks to low physical production and distribution costs benefit publishers.  That no efforts to benefit libraries have been made leads to the conclusion that our vendors prefer to sell to individual attorneys, rather than to libraries.  This forces each attorney to buy a copy of each title, rather than share a copy as needed.  As librarians, we should not abdicate our curatorial role, especially as this scheme is intended to make our clients spend more, with no bottom-line benefit.

Note:  The day this column was due, I received a message from the publisher announcing their new partnership with Overdrive to establish an eBook lending platform.  Perhaps our concerns are overblown, or already being addressed--I certainly hope so.  A better policy for the publisher, though, would be to express intentions BEFORE rolling out new processes, rather than trying to explain what's happening once it has begun.  A recording of the presentation is available here.

Acquisitions

Originally published in the ALLUNY Newsletter 37.1, March 2012.

Spring is here, when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of …baseball? And more importantly, to preparing for the season’s fantasy team draft.  Now, a sports fan knows that nothing is as interesting as his fantasy team, and nothing is so boring as someone else’s team, so let me assure you, this isn’t about my team—not really. I’m writing about resource selection and strategy, which as the New York Times best-seller and Oscar-nominated Moneyball showed, is the real business of baseball, just as it is for libraries.

A bit of background, first. In fantasy baseball, players build teams by selecting rosters of actual Major League players, whose statistical records in several categories are compiled and ranked.  The top-ranked team, based on these stats at the season’s end, wins.  A great player, like Albert Pujols, can contribute mightily to several categories, while one like Coco Crisp may only contribute to one.  So, obviously, Pujols is worth a lot more—and while we all want to choose Pujos, only one can have him.  Strategy is required to make up that value in other ways.

One other note: some leagues start fresh each year, with all players available to everyone in the draft.  Mine has been together more than ten years, though, and decided long ago that for the sake of continuity, each team would be able to ‘keep’ a number of players from one year to the next.  The guy who got Pujols wouldn’t have to give him up, and would have a big advantage each year.

But how does this relate to the library?  Each season, I need to re-evaluate my roster. I need to decide who I want to keep, and who I want to draft, to build the best collection of talent, for my strategy, that I can afford.  Isn’t that just like collection development?

So how would we build a resource team now, if preparing to draft materials?   Perhaps we start by ‘keeping’ those that provide the most value: big hitters like Lexis, Westlaw or Bloomberg are all-around players like Pujols: very hard to replace, and you’ll probably only get one—then examine what else you need to provide a competitive roster within the remaining budget.  If I support a strong energy practice, maybe I should draft an energy-law newsletter this year instead of renewing the bankruptcy report that has been unused for years—that one isn’t helping my team win now.  Will it be better to subscribe to a business-development resource, or will a particular treatise in IP allow my attorney to win more cases and thus bring in new business via enhanced reputation?

And, like baseball, these competitive decisions will change through the season.  That expensive real-estate treatise we had to have for a particular matter? The case is over—canceling the updates is like dropping an injured player so he can be replaced with one who contributes now.  Constant review, coupled with a strategy for maximizing resource value, is the key to building both a successful fantasy team and a useful library.

Exclusive Resources

Orignially published in the ALLUNY Newsletter 36.2, July 2011

A list-serv reader asks

“I am wondering what other Westlaw only firms are planning to do for New York Law Journal access after May 1^st? …. It feels like we are being forced to sign a contract with LexisNexis.”

The question arises as the NYLJ moves from being an exclusive Westlaw resource to an exclusive contract with Lexis, and is problematic because the NYLJ website archives will only provide access to their recently-reported decisions—forcing even direct subscribers to find alternative access for backfile material.

This is, of course, exactly the problem that Lexis-only libraries faced until May, and an increasingly common one in this era of “fiscal responsibility”, when we lose access to familiar resources simply because we can no longer afford them.  But this is also precisely what we have been trained to do—our job, as librarians, is to choose what resources to provide and determine how to work around what we can’t provide.

In some cases, this means finding an alternative, comparable resource.  My attorneys will often ask for a particular article from a subscription service, and in spite of our library magic, we won’t always be able to retrieve the cited item.  In these cases, we try to find something else on the subject—for news or analytical material, there is almost always something else on the subject, and this straightforward substitution, like Pepsi for Coke, is generally acceptable.

NYLJ decisions, though, allow no substitution--they are like Vernor's Ginger Ale.  They aren’t published elsewhere, and they are primary law.  They are necessary for the work we do.  But they aren’t so essential as to justify an entirely new, otherwise redundant database contract, either.  In situations like this, when an item is essential but rarely needed, it is good to have friends.  Especially when those friends also have libraries, as each of us do.

We all have some degree of access to local public, court, and university libraries, and each of these libraries has a public service mission.  Even private firm libraries are usually willing to share unique resources; just last week I received a scan of pages from a California-specific treatise held locally by only one downstate firm.  We all understand the challenges and constraints of the current resource landscape and we are all here to help.  Please, feel free to ask.

Deselection

Originally published in the ALLUNY Newsletter 36.1, March 2011

Most of us became librarians because we love books—love reading them, buying them, discussing them—collecting them and, eventually, realizing we have too many of them.  Acquisitions are the most exciting part of librarianship, after all, and there is always something missing from a collection, but at some point we just run out of shelf space.

We encountered this problem while I was at the University of Michigan’s Undergraduate Library (the UgLi, an appropriate abbreviation if you’ve seen the building).  When built, the UgLi was intended to be a model collection for any undergraduate institution, consisting of the 100,000 most important titles.  This wasn’t an arbitrary number, but one based on the average holdings of a typical liberal arts college and meant to ensure that, no matter an institution’s size, it would provide an appropriate collection for a solid education; if a UMich student needed more, he could walk next door to peruse the five-million plus volumes in the Graduate Library.  Yet after fifty years, during which acquisition librarians tried to maintain currency and relevancy of their collections, the UgLi was now stuffed to over-flowing, with closer to 300,000 volumes in the catalog.

My assignment was developing criteria for our student shelvers to apply in an initial pass through the collection.  Books culled at this stage would get several additional screenings; only those rejected at every step would ultimately be discarded.  For the students, we wanted easy, binary choices.  We had originally selected all of these titles, so quality was no concern—but currency and usage were: we wanted only the most current, and most requested, material.  To achieve this, I built a decision tree, with any ‘yes’ answer meaning a book stayed on the shelf.

The questions: Is the book less than ten years old?  If no, open the book.  Has it been checked out in the past two years?  If no, has it been on course reserves in the past five years?  If no, place it on the culling cart for additional screening.  These three questions address the currency and perceived value of each item, bringing those which are questionable to light.

Next, subject librarians examined the culled items to insure that nothing of seminal importance, the absence of which could compromise a collection’s credibility, was up for withdrawal.  After that, students checked remaining titles against the University catalogue; any unique titles, with no other holdings, were immediately transferred to the Graduate Library.  Books still marked for weeding were then corralled in a holding pen, where selectors from other University libraries had the option of claiming them for transfer.  Only if rejected at every step of the process would a book finally make it to the University book sale, then finally the recycle bins behind the loading dock where, after dark, some sad student might go digging for treasure.

A law library—even an academic one—is of course very different from the UgLi.  For starters, most of our clients wear more than pajamas when they visit.  But the lessons are transferable: when weeding, objectives must be clear; non-arbitrary criteria must be developed to support them; all potentially-affected clientele must be considered.  The UgLi was only interested in the monograph collection; we have additional considerations, as well.  How do print materials relate to, or duplicate, digital collections?  Are we comfortable leasing information via databases, or do we need an archival print copy?  What can we afford, and what do we do about print material no longer kept current?  Each answer is part of the decision and each decision deserves consideration, because mistakes can’t be un-shredded.