The document discusses how digital technologies are driving revolutionary changes in scholarly communication and the role of libraries. It summarizes key concepts from thinkers like Clay Shirky, Clayton Christensen, Tyler Cowen, Michael Buckland, and Ronald Coase that are reshaping expectations and capabilities. Open access is highlighted as a disruptive innovation that may eventually replace traditional subscription models by making information cheaper and more accessible online. The roles and collections of libraries will continue to evolve away from their original paper-based functions as information becomes decentralized and available globally via digital networks.

1. Revolution for Sure
David W. Lewis
NISO Virtual Conference: Revolution or Evolution:
The Organizational Impact of Electronic Content
October 16, 2013
© 2013 David W. Lewis. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

2. “That is what real revolutions are like. The old
stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put
in its place.”
Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” March 2009. Available at:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

3. Resulted in:
1. Scientific Journal
2. Novels
3. Use of alphabetical order as a means of
organizing knowledge
4. Silent reading

4. Resulted in:
5. Literacy became an amateur activity
6. Institutions that had controlled of
information lost that control
7. Renaissance, Reformation, 100 Years War,
etc.

5. Agenda
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Ronald Coase
Job to Be Done
Tyler Cowen and Freestyle Chess
Michael Buckland
Digital Documents
Open Access as a Disruptive Innovation
The Flip
Subsidy Perspective

6. Ronald Harry Coase
“The Nature of the Firm” Economica 4
(16): 386–405 1937
Question: If markets are efficient, why do we
have firms?

7. Ronald Harry Coase
“The Nature of the Firm” Economica 4
(16): 386–405 1937
Question: If markets are efficient, why do we
have firms?
Answer: Transaction Costs

8. Ronald Harry Coase
“The Nature of the Firm” Economica 4
(16): 386–405 1937
• Where the market has high transactions
costs firms bring activities in house
• When transaction costs are low, the market
works and in house activities are dropped

9. “The Nature of the Firm” and Libraries
• In the past the market could not answer
questions
• Now the market can answer many kinds of
questions easily

10. “The Nature of the Firm” and Libraries
• In the past the market could not manage
collections
• Now access to many kinds of collections is
easy
• What is hard now is curation and
preservation of locally produced and special
materials

11. “The Nature of the Firm” and Libraries
Critical Question:
What knowledge management problems do
our institutions and communities have that the
market can’t efficiently solve?
These are the problems we need to focus on

12. Clayton Christensen
“Job to Be Done”
• People have jobs they need to do in their
lives
• They want to do these jobs in the fastest,
easiest, and cheapest ways possible
• They hire products and services to do these
jobs
Carmen Nobel, “Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing,” Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School. February 14, 2011.
Available at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html
Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall, “What Customers Want from Your Products,” Working Knowledge, Harvard
Business School, January 16, 2006. Available at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5170.html

13. Clayton Christensen
“Job to Be Done”
• What jobs are scholars and students hiring
the library to do?
• How do we provide products that do these
jobs quickly, cheaply, and easily?
Carmen Nobel, “Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing,” Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School. February 14, 2011.
Available at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html
Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall, “What Customers Want from Your Products,” Working Knowledge, Harvard
Business School, January 16, 2006. Available at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5170.html

14. "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill.
They want a quarter-inch hole!” — Theodore
Levitt
People don’t want a library. People want
information and answers.

15. Tyler Cowen,
Average is Over: Powering America Beyond
the Age of the Great Stagnation
(New York: Dutton, 2013), page 7.
“We're close to the point where the available
knowledge at the hands of the individual, for
questions that can be posed clearly and
articulately, is not so far from the knowledge of
the entire world...”

16. Tyler Cowen,
Average is Over: Powering America Beyond
the Age of the Great Stagnation
(New York: Dutton, 2013), page 7.
“Whether it is through Siri, Google, or
Wikipedia, there is now almost always a way to
ask and—more importantly—a way to receive
the answer in relatively digestible form.”

17. Tyler Cowen,
Average is Over: Powering America Beyond
the Age of the Great Stagnation
(New York: Dutton, 2013), page 7.
• Freestyle chess
• Professionals will be teamed with intelligent
machines
• The combination of person and machine can
be much better than either alone, though the
machine alone will be often superior to the
person alone

18. Tyler Cowen,
Average is Over: Powering America Beyond
the Age of the Great Stagnation
(New York: Dutton, 2013), page 7.
• As a professional you need to add value
above what the intelligent machine can do
alone
• This is a different skill set than simply doing
the task yourself

19. “Moore’s Law,” Wikipedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law

20. • Watson’s hardware cost $3,000,000 in 2011
• By 2020 the same hardware can be expected
to cost less than $50,000
• By 2030 it should cost less than $750

21. Michael Buckland,
Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto
(Chicago: American Library Association, 1992).
“The central purpose of libraries is to provide a
service: access to information.”
Usually by providing access to documents
HTML version of the text is available at: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Library/Redesigning/html.html

22. Michael Buckland,
Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto
(Chicago: American Library Association, 1992).
1. Paper Library — both bibliographic tools and
document are paper
2. Automated Library — tools electronic and
documents paper
3. Electronic Library — tools and documents
electronic

23. Michael Buckland,
Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto
(Chicago: American Library Association, 1992).
• Library collections serve two purposes
1. Dispensing role
2. Preservation role
• In the paper world the dispensing role is
where the most money is spent

24. Michael Buckland,
Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto
(Chicago: American Library Association, 1992).
• When documents are paper, people and
documents need to be brought together
• Best way to do this is local collections
• Libraries bring documents from the world to
their local communities

25. Michael Buckland,
Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto
(Chicago: American Library Association, 1992).
• When documents are electronic, people can get
them at a distance and instantaneously
• Bibliographic tools and documents move to
world/web scale
• The dispensing role becomes cheaper
• The preservation role becomes more important

26. Melvil Dewey
Our practices and values come from the
Paper Library

27. Paper
•
•
•
•
Localized
One use at a time
Not easily copied
Inflexible, not easily
modified or
annotated
• Storage bulky and
expensive
• Universal
Digital
• Many users at a time
• Easily copied
• Flexible, easily
modified and
annotated
• Storage does not
require much space
and is cheap

28. Paper
• Publishers needed •
• Long lasting medium •
• Preservation
strategies understood
• Emotional
attachment to books
as objects
• Anyone can Publish
Digital
Vulnerable
Long-term
preservation
uncertain

29. Content Supply Chain is All Digital
• Print books delivered nearly as quickly as
digital files
• Digital readers nearly as good as print books

30. Content Supply Chain is All Digital
• You can purchase/access content only when
it is actually needed
• Inventories of content are no longer required
• Inventories become expensive overhead

31. Opportunity Costs of Print Collections
$5.00 to $13.10
$28.77
$50.98 to $68.43
$141.89
Life cycle cost based on 3% discount rate. From Paul N. Courant and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,”
in The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship, CLIR, June 2010, available at:
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub147abst.html

32. Content Supply Chain is All Digital
• Because marginal cost of distributing content
is zero, new business models are possible
• Open Access is the most important so far

33. Open Access
• Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of
charge, and free of most copyright and licensing
restrictions.
• OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing
fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers
(most copyright and licensing restrictions).
Peter Suber, Open access overview, at: http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

34. Open Access
Open Access is:
1. A movement — response to excessive price
increases by commercial journal publishers
2. A new business model for scholarly
communication — costs covered upfront
and the content is then given away

35. Disruptive Innovation
Clayton Christensen
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Soares, and Louis
Caldera, Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver
Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education, February 8,
2011, Available at:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2011/02/0
8/9034/disrupting-college/
Clayton M. Christensen, SC10 Keynote with Clayton Christensen, December 4, 2010, video
running time: 1:00:28, available at: http://insidehpc.com/2010/12/04/video-sc10-keynotewith-clayton-christensen
Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare
Crisis, May 13, 2008, video, running time: 1:27:38, available at:
http://video.mit.edu/watch/the-innovators-prescription-a-disruptive-solution-to-thehealthcare-crisis-9380/
Maxwell Wessel and Clayton M. Christensen, “Surviving Disruption,” Harvard Business Review
90(12):56-64 December 2012.

36. Disruptive Innovation
• Needs
– New Technology (simplified solution)
– New Business Model
– New Value Chain
• Starts as being not good enough and gets
better fast and comes to dominate the
market
• How products become cheaper, faster, and
easier

37. Pace of Substitution of Direct Gold OA for
Subscription Journals
100.0%
90.0%
80.0%
70.0%
60.0%
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
Laakso, et. al. Estimates
S-curve Extrapolation Based on 2000-2009
S-curve Extrapolation Based on 2005-2009
David W. Lewis, “The Inevitability of Open Access,” College & Research Libraries September 2012.
Available at: http://crl.acrl.org/content/73/5/493.full.pdf+html

38. Pace of Substitution of Direct Gold OA for Subscription
Journals (log scale)
100.0%
10.0%
1.0%
Laakso, et. al. Estimates
S-curve Extrapolation Based on 2000-2009
S-curve Extrapolation Based on 2005-2009
David W. Lewis, “The Inevitability of Open Access,” College & Research Libraries September 2012.
Available at: http://crl.acrl.org/content/73/5/493.full.pdf+html

39. Pace of Substitution of Direct Gold OA for
Subscription Journals Based on Additional 2011
European Commission Data
100.0%
90.0%
80.0%
70.0%
60.0%
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
Laakso, et. al. Estimate with EC Data
Extrapolation Based on 2000-2009
Extrapolation Based on 2005-2009
Extrapolation Based on 2000-2011
Extrapolation Based on 2005-2011
David W. Lewis, “The Inevitability of Open Access: Update One.” Available at: https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/3471

40. Old Model
General Public
Scholar
Library
Publisher

41. Funders
General Public
University
Old Model
“Good Old
Days”
Scholar
Library
Publisher

42. Funders
Old Model
“Bad Old
Days”
General Public
University
Scholar
Library
Publisher
Shareholders

43. Funders
Open Access
Future
General Public
University
Scholar
Library
Publisher
Shareholders

44. Funders
Open Access
Future
General Public
University
Scholar
Library
Publisher
Shareholders

45. The Flip
• In a paper world libraries brought documents
from the world to the local community or
institution
• In the digital world libraries collect and
curate “documents” created by or of
importance to the local institution or
community for the world

46. Library

47. Library

48. Library

49. The Subsidy Perspective
• If information is not cheap and easy, people
will not use it to the extent that will
maximize societal benefit
• Information needs to be subsidized
• Libraries have been one important means of
providing this subsidy
See: David W. Lewis "What If Libraries Are Artifact Bound Institutions?" Information Technology and Libraries 17(4):191-197 December
1998. Available at: https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/434.

50. The Subsidy Perspective
• What matters is that information is cheap
and easy
• Preserving the subsidy matters
• Preserving the institutions that once
provided the subsidy is not what is important

51. The Subsidy Perspective
• What matters is getting the most scholarship
to the most people

52. “That is what real revolutions are like. The old
stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put
in its place.”
Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” March 2009. Available at:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

53. Questions/Comments
© 2013 David W. Lewis. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.