One thing I came to understand is that “digital strategy” means a lot of things to a lot of people; my job as Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship had been newly created, and it fell to me to define what I thought the work entailed. In the end, I came to believe that what the Library needed most was a narrative, a vision for what it would be in a future seen by many as threatened by the gathering digital stormclouds, and I spent a lot of my time (in the eyes of some, probably too much of my time) talking to internal and external audiences, telling them stories about the current and future library. To me, this was and still is a promising story of an institution that is an engine for cultural production, a vibrant trading zone for ideas and experiences that is open to all in a particularly American (and particularly New Yorkish) way, a deeply humanistic vision of people drawn together by the rich collections and empowered by digital technology.

As for the Library’s “Digital Strategy” proper, it took more forms that I could have possibly expected, from a 25-page whitepaper that was whittled down to 10 pages, then 5, then 5 one-sheets with a paragraph each and bullet points. There were also slide decks. Oh, the slide decks. Slide decks with Booz Allen consultants, slide decks with McKinsey consultants, slide decks with internal consultants. And in the end, after three years of its evolution and numerous organizational configurations, I’m convinced that the core of the strategy to grow usage and deepen engagement is still as sound as when I first tried to graspingly articulate it in 2007. I’d love to post all of those documents for discussion (or at least my overly-thinky 25-page whitepaper), but for now here’s the 140-character version:

Focus on user experience. Leverage staff expertise for discovery. Digitize special collections. Proactively seed 3rd-party platforms. Trust the public.

Over the past few years, we’ve been able to do some remarkable things that held true to these pretty straightforward principles. And as my ideas for NYPL increasingly became my advice for other libraries, then for libraries, archives and museums, I came to understand that while the New York Public Library is one of the few perches from which one can speak to the broad community and be heard, right now I want to be able to focus all my efforts on initiatives that cross institutional boundaries. I’ve liked to characterize the current moment as a circle of libraries, museums, archives, universities, journalists, publishers, broadcasters and a number of others in the culture industries standing around, eyeing other and at the space in between them while wondering how they need to reconfigure for world of digitally networked knowledge. My new role will be to stand squarely in that space, and the change of perspective is exciting.

When asked about the institution, everyone I know and respect at the Library mentions the sheer possibility embodied by its collections, resources, staff, and communities (usually in an awestruck, “My God, it’s full of stars” tone). Working at the New York Public Library is a study in conflicting emotions; the Library can never reach its full potential because the ceiling is simply too high, the possibilities too immense. At the same time, the fact is that every day at the NYPL is full of minor miracles, chance encounters and inspiring mental connections that both hurl our culture forward and tangibly change lives. These moments are ultimately the work of the heroic staff of the Library, and it’s their company that I’ll miss most of all as I move on to this next adventure.

When movies were first released on videocassette in the mid-1970′s, the assumption was that individual film lovers would buy them for personal use and build home libraries. Until that point, one could only watch a movie on a pay-per-viewing model (i.e. by paying for a seat at a theatrical showing), and since a VCR owner could watch a purchased movie countless times, individual cassettes were priced at dozens of times the going rate for a box-office ticket.

While a handful of enthusiasts did begin to build home libraries, home video didn’t become a mass phenomenon until a different model emerged. Beginning with a handful of entrepreneurs, video store owners began sinking substantial up-front resources into buying inventories of movies, then recouping that investment (and hopefully a profit) by charging a rental fee every time a customer borrowed that movie. Successful storeowners plowed profits into more locations and broader collections, and built a thriving industry between home viewers and movie studios by enabling home viewers to have limited access to items they couldn’t or wouldn’t purchase on their own.

This “circulating library” model was opposed by the movie studios, who were never satisfied with the loss of control of their intellectual property (and their ability to monetize it) after its “first sale” to the video storeowner. Thus, in the late 1980′s a new model emerged, largely facilitated by a company called Rentrak that offered video stores a license-based rather than purchase-based business model. Rentrak would supply a store with as many copies of a given movie as the storeowner wanted at a minimal cost, collecting a percentage of each rental transaction (as monitored by Rentrak’s software on the store’s computers). This enabled video stores to offer guaranteed availability of new releases, limited only by physical shelf space – remember the wall containing shelf after shelf of a given movie (replaced the following week by that week’s new release, and so on) that became common in the early 1990′s? Video stores, particularly large chains, shifted to a hybrid business model, relying on licensing agreements for new releases and already-purchased cassettes for the back catalog.

In 2002, Netflix was pitched as a hyper-efficient version of this hybrid video store. Much has been made of the elimination of the physical store in the Netflix model, but the real breakthrough lay in convincing patrons to manage all of their rental choices well in advance of the moment of delivery. By shifting from a store full of movies waiting to be checked out to a “queue” of customer requests that would be steadily filled, Netflix gained the ability to efficiently manage its inventory and anticipate demand across a nation of viewers. Licensing agreements for mainstream blockbusters allowed Netflix to print additional copies of DVDs as needed (while sending the movie studio a set fee per transaction, a la RentTrak), while the back catalog of DVDs owned by Netflix was managed much more efficiently than any video store could – as soon as a movie was returned, it could immediately be sent out to the next customer in line, spending far less time idle on the shelf.

Though generally assumed to have killed the physical video store, the Netflix model will face its own challenges in the near future. A strategy presentation recently posted online by CEO Reed Hastings estimates that the business of shipping physical DVDs via mail only has a few more years left before being entirely overtaken by online streaming of movies direct to TVs, computers, phones and tablets. Thus, Netflix is working to shift its resources toward its already-successful streaming options, which represent the purest form yet of the licensing model; users who pay a particular monthly rate are entitled to stream a specific number of hours of video per month, and every viewing of a movie by a Netflix user results in a payment to the rightsholder. Netflix (and any other streaming provider) pays no upfront cost to host a streaming video file, but does pay a relatively substantial amount for every stream.

In the end, I’d say that a few key themes emerged:

1) Editing as a category of work in itself

If you think of humanities scholarship using the metaphor of a technology stack, with raw primary collections on the top and published, peer-reviewed articles and monographs at the top, there’s a lot of work in the middle that becomes more complex and more visible in the digital mode. I’d never thought of it until this conference, but the model of the scholarly edition serves as a good model for this middleware-of-sorts, where connections between items build epistemic environments that are intrinsically valuable without pushing fully into argument and analysis.

As became clear, many fields see editionmaking as valid in its own right (i.e. worth giving tenure for), and it seems a much more resonant way to understand many digital humanities “projects” than the scholarly monograph (and offers a path forward for Digital Humanities work beyond the particular focus by funders and others on the rhetoric of “tool-building”). Moreover, editionmaking is interesting because it happens in a number of professional roles; museums, libraries and archives are as intimately involved with the production of scholarly editions as university faculty, unlike other forms of scholarly output.

2) Need to broaden audience for the humanities

“Crowdsourcing” was the general term that kept coming up, but I think it was a placeholder for something broader that might be called “participatory engagement” with audiences both traditional and more popular. In a number of side conversations, it became clear to me that substantial work is to be done to figure out the best ways to funnel enthusiasm into productive work which would out the corpus of available humanities data and metadata without overdetermining the scholarly analysis; as we’re not understanding with our Historical Maps work at NYPL, much of the work here is to determine how to atomize the work involved into granular enough pieces, and how to apply casual gaming mechanics so that the work becomes compelling.

Two other key points here: one is that this was the first discussion of crowdsourcing and the humanities I’ve been involved with in which the idea of engaging undergraduates tipped from intriguing possibility to serious area for experimentation among the participants. Greg Crane’s framing of sentence treebanking by undergraduate students as both pedagogically valuable *and* a useful contribution to the field made tangible what we’ve been seeing with the various classes who’ve been using our maps rectifier: there’s a sweet spot to be explored where participatory archives can both teach and facilitate scholarship in the best tradition of scholarly editions.

The other thought that emerged was that the broader engagement that I and others (notably Cliff Lynch) have been describing as a move from “public humanities” to “citizen humanities” (and for which “crowdsourcing” seems to serve as a useful shorthand) could have very tangible benefits as increased visibility to and participation by the public translates into more public funding. The general perception of the academic humanities as far removed from the daily lives of the general public that is only heightened by isolationist jargon and publishing mechanisms that create rather than break down silos represents a massive failure to make the case for the value of that work to society, and federal/state funding (or the relative lack thereof) follows that lead.

3) How to transition from a moment of physical print publication to the twin production and public engagement phases of digital publishing.

I can’t recall who made this point, but the crux of the shift in scholarship is from a moment of ink being fixed on paper to a conversation, an ongoing process of evolving engagement with the ideas in a text. We had a great discussion on Twitter about the idea of scholarly texts as version-controlled software, where Sharon Leon responded to a comment I made about successive editions as version releases by tweeting, “I’m sure lots of people would like to think that, but there are many bug fixes posing as versions out there.”

Regardless of the quality of the changes, the mapping scholarly conventions like citation onto a world of mutable texts is at the heart of changing norms for digital scholarship, and one for which the example of scholarly editions might well be instructive. One could well think of editions not just as being authored but as being maintained; there’s always potential for more curation, more talmudic commentary around the material at the heart of an edition. If one removes the requirement for a moment of print fixity in order to facilitate dissemination, then the edition becomes a curated data store, always potentially evolving in a way that resonates with the culture of the web itself.

However, there’s a sleeper feature in the iTunes Music Store that has truly disruptive potential for book publishing, if publishers are innovative enough to embrace it: rental. Right now, you can rent access to a movie in iTunes – the file downloads to your device, you can start watching whenever you want, and you have 24 hours from the first time you hit play to finish before the file becomes unplayable. Imagine the same model, completely mundane for a film industry used to the role of video stores in the landscape, applied to books. If a book costs $13 to “buy” in iTunes (one rumor I’ve seen), what’s the right price point for a rental of, say, two weeks?

“But doesn’t that kill libraries,” one might ask? It definitely expands the market for books beyond those who want to pay full price and have access in perpetuity, but this isn’t necessarily bad for libraries IF there’s a mechanism for institutional funding of user rentals. In other words, imagine an option for an institutional iTunes account, where a given user would add a library card number to their iTunes account and their library would pick up the tab when they “rent” books (or, plausibly, even other media)? This isn’t so far afield from current trends toward licensing print and electronic collections for circulation, and in fact might ultimately be a much cleaner business model for circulating collections: a given library has a fixed budget every year to subsidize access, which can be rationed among users according to any number of schemes.

Of course, this would rely on a clear decoupling of the “preservation” mandate of libraries from the “access” mandate, and some parallel ability to ensure long-term preservation of digital book files beyond the particular life of iTunes or even Apple, but that’s a separate issue. I’d argue there a business here that could ultimately grow the market (even if cannibalizing a percentage of conventional “sales”), an opportunity to be explored which might be good for libraries, good for publishers, and good for books.

Lucky me, then, that Khoi Vin and Allan Cole went ahead and created Basic Maths. $30 and a tiny bit of tweaking later (sorry for my bastardizations, guys), and I’ve got a blog that represents the way I like information to look: stark and dense. It’s a little weird to have bought an off-the-rack wordpress theme (I keep thinking of the cookie-cutter avatars in Neil Stephensen’s Snow Crash ), but it feels comfortable enough and beats agonizing over a blank canvas.

Oh, and please pardon the mess while I clean up categories and other bits of residual debris….

1. In general over the past few years, the net flow has been inward, with me taking in more than I’m putting out in a productive way. I’ve always been okay with this, under the assumption that the synthetic way that my brain works means that I’ve got to trawl with a pretty big net and understand that not everything will fit together nicely (or necessarily be useful).
2. Before I joined NYPL in 2007, I was still writing in public, both in discussion fora and on this blog. I can’t say that I wrote meaningful stuff beyond a handful of posts, but it was a way for me to get ideas out in front of a broader audience, and the act of writing (even informally) made me sit down and really chew through the ideas in my head. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage the discipline to continue writing when I jumped on the moving treadmill that was the NYPL (not to mention life with a newborn). Blink your eyes, and we’re almost 3 years later.
   
3. Over the past couple of years, most of the knowledge I’ve been putting out for the world has taken the form of spoken words, either in meetings or in formal presentations. I’ve always loved discussion, and do believe that my best intellectual work happens in a conversational back-and-forth, but I’ve grown concerned that I’ve been indulging overmuch. Back when I was a proper academic, I was never much for publishing articles (my cv only lists one peer-reviewed article and one book review alongside my book), but that preference is starting to do me and my ideas a disservice, in that spoken words simply doesn’t scale to a broader audience (at least, not the way I’ve been doing them – more on that later).
4. Another thought about my time thus far at NYPL; the best persuasive writing I’ve done has been for an audience of a relative handful, whether Senior Management or Trustees. As I think about it, there’s a real shame here; at some point, it’d be great to publish a “greatest Hits” compilation of some of the long, impassioned missives I’ve fired off arguing one point or another, not to mention the white paper I wrote in 2008 on NYPL’s Digital Strategy that never really left the nest (but was pretty influential in charting the next two year’s work).
5. Like a lot of folks I know, my sense of how to convey information in written words has been retracting to a 140-character window over the past year; I’ve got Tweetdeck open constantly, and find in it boundless opportunity for inbound information and lazyweb requests, but I’m suddenly very conscious of what’s been happening to me cognitively. When I first started blogging, I found that when an idea occurred to me I’d start to mentally construct a post; even if it never got “to paper” (and most didn’t), the blog as a structure/genre to think with was a useful tool. Twitter’s appealing in its haiku-like economy, but at this point I do believe that it’s no good for the kind of modern, Enlightment, literate, rational argumentation that I still value immensely (hold the gasps from the back of the room).

So, all this adds up to two intertwined problems: my thinking’s been getting lazier/sloppier/less rigorous, and what I do have to contribute to the discussion isn’t getting out in a productive way that’s useful at scale to the various communities that I want to engage. Ironically, I’ve spent the past two years arguing that the smartest strategy for a cultural heritage organization is to leverage its staff’s expertise by getting them to author knowledge that’s discoverable online, and my own thoughts have been warrened away in spoken words and private emails.

With that in mind, I’m resurrecting this blog, knowing that it’s going to be a painful and lurching process to get my writing (and discipline) back into shape. As I look around, there are two bloggers who particularly inspire me right now; my old friend and colleague Dan Cohen, and my friend Chris Dixon. Both are doing great writing that’s on point for their respective communities, and both blogs are rich with ideas and provocative discussion. At the same time, I’ll see if I can start exposing more of the information-trawling I do every day in a more raw form, with the hope of providing something of use for whoever might be interested (check out the right sidebars for more of that coming online in the next few weeks).

One of the emerging themes in the digital book world that has shown up prominently in several big news stories over the past few weeks has been the idea of lending, and its place in the digital world. First Barnes & Noble’s new Nook promised the ability to lend an ebook from one device to another, while still only allowing one reader (in both the device and user sense) to read a given purchased copy at a time. This has been hailed as one of the big advancements over either the Kindle or the Sony Reader, and fits with our general sense of what it means to “buy” a book (however applicable that word actually is in the digital realm).

Then, the Internet Archive, in announcing its new BookServer architecture, made a sidelong claim that their book trading zone would enable an owner of a digital copy to “lend” it to another user; moreover, Brewster Kahle advanced a claim he’s been nursing for a while, that in fact the spirit of first sale implies that the owner of a physical book should be able to “lend” a digital copy of that purchased book so long as she didn’t use the physical book while the virtual one was “out for circulation”…essentially, that the IA had put the technology in place to enable users to treat the purchase of a book as a one-simultaneous-user license for that book, regardless of whether that use was physical or digital.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, so what? It’s an interesting argument, and I like the principle of lending, but it’s just another example of treating digital books like physical ones, a little bit of sugar to make the DRM go down. There’s nothing transformational here.”

Except that we forget that lending only works because most people don’t. Lend, that is. Most physical books spend the vast majority of their existence sitting on shelves, waiting to be read. Now, imagine that lending can happen in a digitally-networked, global ecosystem in which the borrower of a book doesn’t need to know the lender, and which can be optimized so that the moment that a book is no longer being used, it’s immediately available to be borrowed again. Push further – what does “use” mean in such a context? If borrowing and returning happen at Twitter-speed in a persistently-networked environment, then the moment that the borrower’s eyeballs aren’t scanning a book, it could be considered “returned” and thus available for another user.

In short, assuming a hyper-efficient distribution system, how many truly simultaneous users are there for a given text? And if Brewster’s logic holds and the purchase of a physical book is understood under a reading of first sale to effectively constitute a single-simultaneous-user license, then the market for sales of a given book retracts from the number of people or institutions who might want to read a book (and thus buy it in anticipation of use) to the maximum number of people worldwide who are *actively reading* that book at any given moment in time. This also means that those individuals and institutions (like libraries) that have large stores of books could be sitting on top of a huge amount of untapped value in the form of potential readers for their materials, provided a scan could be created.

There are a number of places this could lead, but there’s one that I find most intriguing and unexpected: what if this very idea is what pushes small-run publishing out of the fabrication of print books altogether, and wholly into the arms of digital-only licensing models with their much-less-leaky rights regimes? Who’d have thought that the physical book might turn out to be way more flexible and subversive than a born-digital copy? Either way, there’s a huge, open question as to how efficient networked digital lending will be allowed to become.

For a project we’ve got going on at NYPL, I need to get about 1200 references from spreadsheets into Zotero; I’m figuring it’s generously maybe 15-20 hours of work, since roughly half are represented in NYPL’s catalog (and thus are easy fodder for ingesting). I’ve been asking around, and keep coming up short…anyone out there in the blogosphere want to do a little freelancing or have a student who they’d like to refer? Timeframe is very short (ideally within a week turnaround, maybe two)…if interested, leave a comment below and I’ll e-mail regarding money stuff.

Until I encountered Roy and the Center he’d created, I had a diverse collection of academic and technological interests, and it took three years of quiet osmosis and subtle mentoring for them to cohere. It wasn’t until I left GMU earlier this year that I began to truly appreciate what he did for me, and I’ll spend the rest of my career paying that forward. For now, though it’s just a beginning, this is dedicated to Roy…