The donor restrictions are also negotiable. The degree of restriction is not relevant to this discussion.
As for "conduit", I wonder how many librarians feel they are money pipes between their institution and the publishers.
At the risk of being drafted into the monastic orders, I’ll respond once more on this thread and then stop.
Donor funds are actually a very interesting case in the context of this discussion – because they’re usually far more restrictive than institutionally-allocated funds are. Whereas a university typically says
to its library each year “Here’s $X for collections, and $X for personnel, and $X for operations (etc.)”, a donor is much more likely to say “Here’s $X which, in honor of my late father, you may use to purchase 15th-century Persian texts in Greek
translation.” (And if that sounds like an exaggeration, I would suggest that you haven’t spent much time raising money for libraries.)
It's not unheard of, but relatively rare, for a donor (or a host institution) to give money to a library and say “Do whatever you want with this money.” Generally, both donors and host institutions provide
funds to libraries so that the library will do things that the donors and the institutions want done. For the library to accept those funds and then use them to pursue a different agenda isn’t “courageous”; it’s dishonest and unethical.
(In case anyone might find it interesting and/or amusing, I wrote a brief piece in
Library Journal ten years ago on the vagaries of gifts in libraries, called “Kitten in a Beer Mug: The Myth of the Free Gift”:
https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/kitten-in-a-beer-mug-the-myth-of-the-free-gift-peer-to-peer-review.)
I have been involved closely enough with libraries and consortia (CRKN in this case) to know the degrees of freedom libraries have once they take hold of their budget from their overarching institution. Arguing that libraries are
not the source of their money is Jesuitical at best. Yes, the money is allocated by someone else - a university, whatever - and yes they have to report to someone in the administration, once the money is spent. But they can also raise money - my wife was doing
that brilliantly at McGill - and they are not just conduits.
That is what lucidity (and courage) mean,
Jean-Claude
On 2024-03-07 08:51, Rick Anderson wrote:
I realize that the differences between this odd caricature of my previous message and what I actually said are obvious and don’t require a detailed rebuttal.
But I do want to emphasize that by pointing out the fact that libraries are not the source of the funds that they inject into the scholcomm system, I neither said nor implied that
librarians are either “powerless” or not “strong.” Nor did I characterize examples of libraries “successfully redirecting money towards various openness initiatives” as “marginal”; I actually called them “very impressive.”
Yrs. in lucid thinking,
Rick
On 2024-03-06 16:32, Rick Anderson wrote:
This is a very common misconception among people who don’t work in libraries, and for some reason it’s proven very difficult to dislodge. The actual reality is that libraries are not sources of money at all;
they’re conduits through which money flows. The source of that money is the libraries’ host institutions.
Rick makes a gallant attempt to demonstrate the powerlessness of librarians within their institutions. What he is really referring to is an instance of institutional politics where librarians, while not in a dominant position,
nonetheless enjoy a degree of power and some ability to negotiate. What I am referring to is that when librarians become aware of their real power (which is not all that great, but, once again, is not zero), they have to think lucidly on how they can put some
direction and coherence on their conduits.
If I were to believe that librarians are truly passive conduits, I would pity them deeply. I have too much knowledge about, admiration for and faith in that profession to know that librarians can do more than what Rick states.
He himself admits that it exists. He tries to reduce this to marginal exceptions, but that is another question that some evidence-based scholars can solve, I believe. One only has to think about the book-banning efforts in the US and how librarians react.
This is a strong and generally courageous profession.
Jean-Claude
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