- Email: [email protected]
An Interview with Edward J. Valauskas
Serial Conversations An Interview with Edward J. Valauskas Emily McElroy, Column Editor with a contribution from Heather Cannon In May 2003 Heather Cannon interviewed Edward J. Valauskas, manager of the Library and Plant Information Office of the Chicago Botanic Garden and chief editor of First Monday. Valauskas discusses the issues surrounding producing e-journals, as well as the skills librarians will need to work with changing technologies in the future. Valauskas also describes the Chicago Botanic Garden’s recent acquisition of a collection of rare historical books and journals about botany and horticulture from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Serials Review 2003; 29:305–310. © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Edward J. Valauskas is chief editor of First Monday, a peer-reviewed, monthly journal published on the Internet about the Internet. He is the manager of the Library and Plant Information Office of the Chicago Botanic Garden. In 1993 he founded and is principal of Internet Mechanics, a consulting group providing assistance to corporations, government agencies, nonprofit associations, and others about the Internet. Valauskas has authored many articles and written and edited four books about the Internet and technology’s effects on and uses in libraries and the classroom. He is a senior fellow in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. He was an instructor at the International Centre for Information Management Systems & Services at Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, and an adjunct instructor at the graduate library schools of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Emporia State University (Kansas). He has served on the board of directors for the Library & Information Technology Association (LITA) and the governing board of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). He has also served on the North Suburban Library System (Illinois) board of trustees.
Edward Valauskas (EV): Well, there are a couple things I’m doing. Here at the Chicago Botanic Garden, I’m manager of the Library and Plant Information Office. I’m responsible for six staff and about 140 volunteers. We provide information based on botanical and horticultural questions to the public, to staff, and to professionals around the world. The Library and Plant Information Office answers approximately forty thousand questions a year about horticulture and botany. There is a rich variety of questions from the very basic ones to very esoteric and scholarly questions. That certainly keeps me busy, along with building up the collections of the library. We just acquired a rare book collection so that’s something else we’re also working on. If you’re interested in knowing about e-journals, we have on the Chicago Botanic Garden Website an electronic magazine called Current Books on Gardening and Botany which appears six times a year.1 It’s a review magazine about new books on gardening and botany. We have about twenty-five reviewers, both volunteers and staff here at the Botanic Garden. We review thirteen to twenty books each issue, covering largely botanical, horticultural, and landscape architectural books. It’s fun doing that, getting the word out about some books that people wouldn’t normally know about. I teach a couple of Internet courses each semester at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University and one course a semester during the summer. Kate Marek and I teach classes on information policy. This semester I’m doing a class new for me, a science reference class. In the fall, I taught a history of printing class, actually at the Botanic Garden, and students worked with some of the rare books in this collection.
Heather Cannon (HC): You’ve held a number of roles in different enterprises and on different committees. What are you currently involved in?
Cannon is a Graduate Student at Dominican University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, River Forest, IL 60305; e-mail: [email protected]. 0098-7913/03$–see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S0098-7913(03)00107-2
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who at the time was in India in Delhi, but now is in Holland at the University of Maastricht. Esther Dyson, often called the most powerful woman in computing, has her own consulting firm in Manhattan. In October 1995 we had a meeting with Esther Dyson, Anders Geersten, who was vice-president of journals, and myself to talk about the journal. At that meeting we settled on a name, First Monday, its frequency, and a plan of production. Munksgaard did the initial design which we’ve largely retained. We then started working on content. We spent a long time trying to find really good papers for the first issue. The journal first appeared at the International World Wide Web Conference in Paris in May of 1996. In 1998 Munksgaard decided that it had learned as much as it could and wanted to sell First Monday. Esther, Rishab, and I were receiving some royalties from Munksgaard and said we would buy it for the fees we were being paid. They were happy to do that, so we bought First Monday and talked to Sharon Hogan, the former director of libraries of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Sharon agreed to sponsor a server for First Monday at UIC. So, we moved it from Copenhagen to Chicago and started publishing locally, starting with the first issue in January of 1999. That’s sort of the history of it. Briefly. And it’s still going, although the June issue is a little late. It should be out next week. We’re still publishing on a monthly basis.
HC: Is this a new course? EV: No, it’s a course that’s been offered before, but it had not been taught in awhile. The course is still the traditional course, but it met one weekend a month and students came in Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning. I also work on an e-journal called First Monday. I was the founder of this journal in 1996, and I am also the chief editor. It’s a monthly journal about the Internet. It publishes five or six articles each issue, plus book reviews, and an occasional interview. HC: How was First Monday started? EV: It’s a good story. I was interested in publishing in part because of my work on a copyright committee. I was chair of the American Library Association (ALA) Copyright Subcommittee, which reported to the ALA Committee on Legislation. I was involved in the early and mid-90s with efforts to review how copyright might be affected by a more accessible Internet. In 1993 President Clinton established the Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) to describe the administration’s vision for the National Information Infrastructure (NII). There was an official committee that was looking at copyright, the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, and I was one of the official representatives for libraries to that group. At the hearings for those meetings, I was frustrated by the publishers and their concerns about copyright and the Internet. They had concerns that the Internet would destroy their works and lead to widespread piracy. I kept talking about some of the ways that the Internet could accommodate copyright. I then began to formulate an idea about a journal. It would be a journal that would only be on the Internet, freely available, and the authors, not the publishers, would actually retain the copyright to all the works published in the journal. Most of the publishers thought that it was a goofy premise for a scholarly journal. In 1995 I had a chance to talk to some of the senior staff at Munksgaard, a Danish publisher. At that time Munksgaard was publishing a number of scientific and medical journals, but they were also publishing a library journal called Libri. My wife is an editor of Libri even though Munksgaard doesn’t publish it anymore. So, they were visiting my wife and talking to her about Libri. They made an offhand remark and said, “Well, Ed, do you have any ideas about journals?” I said, “I’ve actually had this idea about an e-journal, an Internet journal.” They said, flippantly, “Oh, well, send us a proposal.” So, I wrote up a proposal for what’s become First Monday. They were very interested in it because they had no electronic or Internet publishing at that point in 1995. They didn’t want to risk any of their traditional journals, their print journals, by transforming them into an electronic Internet journal. For them the idea was to do a new journal to gain the experience of doing electronic publishing and then transfer that experience to their other journals. So, they agreed to start up First Monday. In September 1995 I put together a strong editorial board, which we still have. Two of the people involved from the beginning were Esther Dyson and Rishab Ghosh,
HC: In “The Economics of Electronic Journals” in First Monday, Andrew Odlyzko wrote that “most publishers claim that they will not survive and will be replaced by electronic subscription journals. Even some editors of the free journals agree with that assessment.”2 It’s been six years since he wrote that and free electronic journals, including First Monday, are still around. What do you see as the future for free electronic journals? EV: Free e-journals are free only because lots of people agree to do the work to make them possible. First Monday is only possible because of the large group of people and their institutions that support it. What that means is that people are giving up their time and giving up their resources to make it possible. So, First Monday is possible because we have, first of all, a group of editors who are willing to do the work for free. We have people who do the markup, editing, and the reading of manuscripts—all for free. They don’t expect compensation. We have UIC, an institution that supports the server and does that without expecting compensation. We have authors who willingly give us their works for free. They retain copyright to their works, but they give us their works. All of those people and the institutions behind those people make this possible and allow for the journal to continue being free. We also have readers around the world who take advantage of the fact that it is free. Not only is the current (newest) issue free, but all of the back issues are free, so readers can explore the magazine as much as they want. The success of First Monday is contingent on being free and openly accessible. If we change that model by charging something, even a few pennies, we would have some real problems with our readers. And I think some of our contributors and our editors would have some real
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problems continuing to do their work for First Monday. We feel very strongly about this model and will continue to try to do this. There are times when I certainly feel that all of us involved would love it if we were making enough money that we could just do First Monday exclusively. But, that’s a big pipe dream. We all enjoy doing First Monday the way we’re doing it. In some ways I see First Monday like an open source journal, like Linux, where we have all these people contributing to make this really good thing. If we changed it, what we would have would be quite different, maybe not as good. For the time being we’re going to try real hard to continue this way.
with even a picture of it in my head, so it’s something I’ve never really thought of too much. HC: Are you concerned about the prestige of the journal at all? EV: First Monday is cited very heavily. We have thousands of hyperlinks to it from other servers around the Web. If you go into Google and look at the links to First Monday, we have an astonishing number. It’s ranked very highly by search engines like Google. Citations to First Monday appear in all sorts of places, even in prestigious journals like Nature, Science, and other journals. So, I can’t say I’m not concerned about prestige. It doesn’t keep me awake at night. If we publish good papers in First Monday, prestige will come. I think we already have a certain prestige in our niche.
HC: What do you see as being the major advantages and disadvantages of being online entirely and not in print? EV: Being online means everyone has relatively instant access to First Monday wherever at any time. Being online shifts the printing burden to the reader. Being online—and that means every issue from the beginning—means easy access to the contents via search engines. Disadvantages? Monitors are not the best media. Computers and network connections can fail. Servers can be slow. But there is no way that First Monday could reach hundreds of thousands of readers in hundreds of places in any other way.
HC: Going back to when you said you couldn’t imagine a print version of First Monday, I have another question regarding electronic versus print formats. In 1994 you wrote an article in Computers & Libraries explaining the difficulties in reading text on a computer screen.3 EV: Oh, yes, absolutely.
HC: What would be different if First Monday were a print publication?
HC: Have things changed since then with higher resolutions or are people simply getting used to it?
EV: Part of my fear is if we had a dedicated staff, if I was doing First Monday and nothing else and I had a group of people working for me—say, a small staff of three or four people that were working on First Monday—I’m afraid we might actually ruin the magazine. We might actually do things to it that would either ruin its appearance or ruin the content. The very simplicity of First Monday makes it attractive. If we had a group of people who were dedicated to working on First Monday, I think we would make it much more complex, much more unattractive than it is now. The viability of First Monday for our readers is its simplicity, its innocent roots. Everything we try to do as far as improvements is a matter of trying to make it easier to use and more accessible. My fear is that we would do more harm than good.
EV: There are still problems reading from a computer screen because of flicker. The newer monitors, the flat screen monitors, have certainly reduced some of the readability issues that I brought up in that article. Print is still a much easier medium to read, especially when you have a journal like First Monday that publishes really long articles—articles that don’t often have graphics and articles that go on for awhile. I know that many people who use First Monday on a regular basis print the articles for their own files and reference. So, what we’ve done is shift the burden of creating a print journal to our users. That means that they in a sense are picking up that printing cost. They are making that a local decision rather than the publisher making that decision. I hope that monitor technologies continue to change in such a way that it will be easier to read from a screen. One of the things that we need to do at First Monday is to look at ways of making the magazine more readable. We’ve been looking at experimenting with putting drop quotes into articles to break up blocks of texts. We’ve been encouraging authors to put illustrations in their papers. We experiment with making the papers themselves more readable on the screen, but I think most people who read First Monday probably get about a page into it and then just decide to print it.
HC: Do you think that being electronic-only has affected First Monday’s prestige? EV: It’s an interesting point. I think if we were in print, First Monday might cater to a different kind of audience. The cost of printing would be quite astronomical. Munksgaard once estimated that printing First Monday would have meant hundreds of dollars a year for a subscription to cover printing, shipping, and mailing costs. Because it’s not in print, those costs are not there. Certainly there are other costs. There’s enormous cost for the time of everyone involved, but they’re all giving that time or their institutions are giving that time to make the journal possible. Certainly, maintaining and running the server is not free. Those costs are accommodated in some ways to make this model work and to make this journal work in a special way. A print version of First Monday . . . trying to imagine it . . . I’ve never been able to come up
HC: I know I do. The only things I read on screen are e-books on my PDA (personal digital assistant), but on the large computer screen, I print out anything I want to read. EV: Right. The basic issues that I brought up years ago are still there. There have been some slight improvements, but unfortunately not big improvements in making a computer screen work like paper.
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has been picked up in law journals recently because people have been trying to understand legislation surrounding the Internet. Certainly, I present one view. Not everyone agrees with my view, but I present one view of how legislation and law should treat the Internet and look at the Internet community. That was a fun paper to write. It was based on a talk that I did.5 It was fun doing the talk and writing the paper. Even though it’s very old, I’ve gotten a lot of response from readers. I should do a revision of it, even though some of it is still true.
HC: How has your role as a librarian influenced your role as an editor and vice versa? EV: That’s a good question. As an editor, being a librarian means that I have a bias toward papers that talk about information policies. Also, I’ve always had an interest in copyright, how it influences libraries, and the sort of public organizations that provide information for the public good. My library tendencies show up as an editor. I’m dependent on other editors for the more technical articles or articles in other areas where I’m less familiar, like economics on the Internet, programming, anthropology, or how people are using the Internet. My biases definitely come through. What I learn from First Monday is lots about other areas of use of the Internet that I wouldn’t normally know about. That makes me a better librarian. It certainly makes me a much better instructor because what I bring to the classroom or what I bring to the job is experience and familiarity with areas that I would never have known about. That is my personal compensation for doing all the work on First Monday— learning about those other areas. We have contributors to First Monday from at least thirty different countries. We have readers in 120 to 130 different countries. So I’ve gotten to know lots of people through First Monday in this virtual way. That’s made me both a better editor and a better librarian.
HC: You teach a number of Internet-related courses at Dominican University. What skills do you consider most important for library and information science students to acquire for work with today’s electronic resources? EV: The thing that I try to have most of the students do is not to be afraid; to make them not afraid of technology and to be willing to explore and willing to try something. If it breaks, it breaks, and you try again. The students I’m most proud of in these classes are students who will admit to me that they’re very technophobic, that they’re afraid of computers, that they don’t like computers. In some of the classes that I teach they learn basic Web design. They learn ten or fifteen commands in HTML, and they’re able to create some basic, simple Web pages. Watching those students gain control of their computer and their computer monitor and actually create something is really wonderful. Some of the students have really blossomed from those courses. The big picture that I try to get them to learn is that these technologies are something that they need to know about. What I tell them is that librarians will need to be information mechanics. They will need to be individuals who will help others with computers and information. They will have to fine-tune how somebody’s doing a search. They’ll have to get into the innards of a search strategy and figure them out. So, they really are these mechanics doing that. But, they’re bringing a sense of the broader issues that someone doing a search, working at the computer, with a program, or with a search engine may not understand. They bring special skills to that interaction with the patron. They need to take advantage of new technologies. In my class, I can’t tell them about new technologies because I don’t know what they’re going to be. What I want them to get from my classes is a level of comfort with technology and a level of confidence so that they use that confidence with new technologies in ways that I can’t even imagine. I see that happening. I see the transformation, especially with students who are afraid of technology and afraid of computers. It’s very flattering.
HC: Do you think you get more interaction, direct interaction, from your readers because you’re online? EV: Yes, I think I do. For instance, Clifford Lynch told me last year that he gets more responses, more queries, and more comments about his papers in First Monday than from anything else he’s published anywhere else. Other contributors to First Monday have repeated this remark consistently. That’s because we have such a broad readership. And, because it’s electronic, people are more comfortable writing to an author with a comment, either positive or negative, about what they’ve read. For the authors, that feedback allows them to think about brand new kinds of articles and research, and expand their ideas. As an editor, comments help me think about different directions for the journal and to explore topics that I might not have thought about. It’s the give and take of the electronic medium. The comfort of our readers to contact us and contribute their ideas is what really makes the magazine work, unlike other kinds of magazines. HC: You once wrote an article about the community of the Internet and laws regarding it. EV: Yes, that was published in First Monday called “Lex Networkia.”4
HC: Do you think that there are enough technologyrelated courses being taught right now? Or do you think technology needs to be more or less of a focus?
HC: Right. That article was actually heavily distributed on a mailing list I was on at the time. Everybody was talking about it when it came out in 1996. That mailing list is a very small social community like the one you describe. It was a very good article.
EV: Well, I think there’s a combination. A need for both the sort of practical technology practices—how to do XYZ with the Internet or XYZ with databases or a specific program. That learning has a certain utility, but not because you’re going to learn how to do these things
EV: Thank you. It’s still being read even though it is very old (on an Internet scale). That article, interestingly,
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and use them twenty years from now. The programs you’re learning now will not exist in twenty years, or they’ll be totally transformed. By learning certain programs and certain computer ways you’re building confidence with future computers and programs. That’s the important thing that you get out of these classes. The other aspect that more classes need to think about and that Kate Marek and I try to accomplish in our information policy class is to make students see the big picture— to think about the implications of changes in laws that will affect how libraries do their business and to make students aware that they have a voice so that they can do something as individuals about affecting policy. We need the sort of practical work with technology and policy issues to give students confidence in both areas: confidence in technology and confidence as a spokesperson for information policy to affect change—to protect those who won’t speak up, or can’t speak up, for themselves, and to make sure that information continues to be available and accessible for as many people as possible.
ticultural history and scholarship for a period of five hundred years from the oldest book in the collection and one of the first botanical books ever published (in 1483) to many books and journals published in the nineteenth century. The collection was originally owned by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Boston, which was founded in 1829 and had, at one point in the nineteenth century, the best botanical and horticultural library in the world. Through a variety of circumstances, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society made a decision to sell a portion of its library. The Chicago Botanic Garden was in the right place. Some of my staff was attending a meeting where they heard a rumor that this might be happening. They brought the information back to me. The Botanic Garden worked very quickly to proceed and see if this was true. It was true. We were able to complete the negotiations last summer with the deal completed in early fall 2002, and we moved the collection last fall. It took several semi trucks to move the entire collection. We’re studying ways in which the collection needs to be cataloged. So there’s lots of work that we’re doing on that. For cataloging, our staff is using library school students, some from Dominican University, some from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We’re looking at a variety of plant resources to help finish the cataloging, and we are planning exhibits. Also, we’re planning with a company from California called Octavo that does digitization of rare books to make some of the rare books available on CD-ROMs. They’ve worked with places like the Library of Congress and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Octavo creates spin-offs of their high quality images by photographing the books at ten thousand dots per inch, very detailed imaging. Other companies get those high quality images and then create other products like prints. So, we have a number of projects ahead—trying to get the collection cataloged, trying to think about exhibits that we can use with the collection, making the collection better known so that scholars will work with the collection. We want to familiarize ourselves with the collection. There are lots of interesting things in the collection that we’re discovering—letters, illustrations, and graphics that are just quite wonderful.
HC: Related to information policy, as well as to First Monday being electronic, who should have responsibility for archiving e-journals? EV: We have UIC, our current service provider, make multiple backups of First Monday, of the server, and I, personally, make backups as well. So, there are levels of backups made at an institutional level. I think most electronic publications are doing that. Archiving is really about the amount of education the people with whom you are working have. If you work with an Internet service provider or a person who doesn’t recognize the value of backups, then you shouldn’t be working with that person or that organization. It would be hard to make some big rule saying that the XYZ organization should be receiving all electronic backups. But, it may come to that. It may come to the point where you have an organization, like the Library of Congress, that says, “Once a year First Monday and all e-journals should send us a disk, a zip disk, or a CD-ROM, with all your backfiles on it.” It may come to that because, if e-journals really become much more common, we may need at some point some national or international clearinghouses that will provide access to backups in case something happens locally where a building is destroyed, and you lose all your backups. That may happen eventually, but it hasn’t happened yet. Right now it’s a personal, local responsibility issue.
HC: So the collection came to you uncataloged?
HC: Completely changing the topic. In late 2002 the library of the Chicago Botanic Garden acquired over four thousand rare books and journal titles. Is that correct?
EV: The journals were completely uncataloged. A portion of the books was cataloged, but they were not cataloged well. So, we’re going to have to recatalog them. The remaining portion of the books was not cataloged at all. So, we’re going to have to do a lot of work. Rare book and journal cataloging is laborious and will take some time.
EV: It acquired 2,219 rare books and 2,000 journals. Altogether about fifty thousand pounds of material.
HC: That’s all the questions I have for you. Thank you very much for meeting with me.
HC: Could you tell me a little bit about what was involved in that, and what is going on now?
Notes
EV: It’s a very interesting and neat collection because the collection provides a snapshot of botanical and hor-
1. Chicago Botanic Garden, http://www.chicago-botanic.org (5 August 2003).
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2. Andrew Odlyzko, “The Economics of Electronic Journals,” First Monday 2, no. 8, August 1997, http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/ issue2_8/odlyzko/index.html (5 August 2003).
4. Edward J. Valauskas, “Lex Networkia: Understanding the Internet Community,” First Monday 1, no. 4, October 1996, http://www.first monday.dk/issues/issue4/valauskas/ (5 August 2003).
3. Edward J. Valauskas, “Reading and Computers—Paper-Based or Digital Text: What’s Best?” Computers in Libraries 14, no. 1 (January 1994): 44–47.
5. Edward J. Valauskas, “Access Denied? Effects of Censorship, Copyright and the Network Culture on Electronic Access to Information.” Paper presented at Library and Information Technology Association’s President Program, New York, NY, July 1996.
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Edward J. Valauskas is chief editor of First Monday, a peer-reviewed, monthly journal published on the Internet about the Internet. He is the manager of the Library and Plant Information Office of the Chicago Botanic Garden. In 1993 he founded and is principal of Internet Mechanics, a consulting group providing assistance to corporations, government agencies, nonprofit associations, and others about the Internet. Valauskas has authored many articles and written and edited four books about the Internet and technology’s effects on and uses in libraries and the classroom. He is a senior fellow in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. He was an instructor at the International Centre for Information Management Systems & Services at Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, and an adjunct instructor at the graduate library schools of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Emporia State University (Kansas). He has served on the board of directors for the Library & Information Technology Association (LITA) and the governing board of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). He has also served on the North Suburban Library System (Illinois) board of trustees.
Edward Valauskas (EV): Well, there are a couple things I’m doing. Here at the Chicago Botanic Garden, I’m manager of the Library and Plant Information Office. I’m responsible for six staff and about 140 volunteers. We provide information based on botanical and horticultural questions to the public, to staff, and to professionals around the world. The Library and Plant Information Office answers approximately forty thousand questions a year about horticulture and botany. There is a rich variety of questions from the very basic ones to very esoteric and scholarly questions. That certainly keeps me busy, along with building up the collections of the library. We just acquired a rare book collection so that’s something else we’re also working on. If you’re interested in knowing about e-journals, we have on the Chicago Botanic Garden Website an electronic magazine called Current Books on Gardening and Botany which appears six times a year.1 It’s a review magazine about new books on gardening and botany. We have about twenty-five reviewers, both volunteers and staff here at the Botanic Garden. We review thirteen to twenty books each issue, covering largely botanical, horticultural, and landscape architectural books. It’s fun doing that, getting the word out about some books that people wouldn’t normally know about. I teach a couple of Internet courses each semester at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University and one course a semester during the summer. Kate Marek and I teach classes on information policy. This semester I’m doing a class new for me, a science reference class. In the fall, I taught a history of printing class, actually at the Botanic Garden, and students worked with some of the rare books in this collection.
Heather Cannon (HC): You’ve held a number of roles in different enterprises and on different committees. What are you currently involved in?
Cannon is a Graduate Student at Dominican University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, River Forest, IL 60305; e-mail: [email protected]. 0098-7913/03$–see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S0098-7913(03)00107-2
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who at the time was in India in Delhi, but now is in Holland at the University of Maastricht. Esther Dyson, often called the most powerful woman in computing, has her own consulting firm in Manhattan. In October 1995 we had a meeting with Esther Dyson, Anders Geersten, who was vice-president of journals, and myself to talk about the journal. At that meeting we settled on a name, First Monday, its frequency, and a plan of production. Munksgaard did the initial design which we’ve largely retained. We then started working on content. We spent a long time trying to find really good papers for the first issue. The journal first appeared at the International World Wide Web Conference in Paris in May of 1996. In 1998 Munksgaard decided that it had learned as much as it could and wanted to sell First Monday. Esther, Rishab, and I were receiving some royalties from Munksgaard and said we would buy it for the fees we were being paid. They were happy to do that, so we bought First Monday and talked to Sharon Hogan, the former director of libraries of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Sharon agreed to sponsor a server for First Monday at UIC. So, we moved it from Copenhagen to Chicago and started publishing locally, starting with the first issue in January of 1999. That’s sort of the history of it. Briefly. And it’s still going, although the June issue is a little late. It should be out next week. We’re still publishing on a monthly basis.
HC: Is this a new course? EV: No, it’s a course that’s been offered before, but it had not been taught in awhile. The course is still the traditional course, but it met one weekend a month and students came in Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning. I also work on an e-journal called First Monday. I was the founder of this journal in 1996, and I am also the chief editor. It’s a monthly journal about the Internet. It publishes five or six articles each issue, plus book reviews, and an occasional interview. HC: How was First Monday started? EV: It’s a good story. I was interested in publishing in part because of my work on a copyright committee. I was chair of the American Library Association (ALA) Copyright Subcommittee, which reported to the ALA Committee on Legislation. I was involved in the early and mid-90s with efforts to review how copyright might be affected by a more accessible Internet. In 1993 President Clinton established the Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) to describe the administration’s vision for the National Information Infrastructure (NII). There was an official committee that was looking at copyright, the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, and I was one of the official representatives for libraries to that group. At the hearings for those meetings, I was frustrated by the publishers and their concerns about copyright and the Internet. They had concerns that the Internet would destroy their works and lead to widespread piracy. I kept talking about some of the ways that the Internet could accommodate copyright. I then began to formulate an idea about a journal. It would be a journal that would only be on the Internet, freely available, and the authors, not the publishers, would actually retain the copyright to all the works published in the journal. Most of the publishers thought that it was a goofy premise for a scholarly journal. In 1995 I had a chance to talk to some of the senior staff at Munksgaard, a Danish publisher. At that time Munksgaard was publishing a number of scientific and medical journals, but they were also publishing a library journal called Libri. My wife is an editor of Libri even though Munksgaard doesn’t publish it anymore. So, they were visiting my wife and talking to her about Libri. They made an offhand remark and said, “Well, Ed, do you have any ideas about journals?” I said, “I’ve actually had this idea about an e-journal, an Internet journal.” They said, flippantly, “Oh, well, send us a proposal.” So, I wrote up a proposal for what’s become First Monday. They were very interested in it because they had no electronic or Internet publishing at that point in 1995. They didn’t want to risk any of their traditional journals, their print journals, by transforming them into an electronic Internet journal. For them the idea was to do a new journal to gain the experience of doing electronic publishing and then transfer that experience to their other journals. So, they agreed to start up First Monday. In September 1995 I put together a strong editorial board, which we still have. Two of the people involved from the beginning were Esther Dyson and Rishab Ghosh,
HC: In “The Economics of Electronic Journals” in First Monday, Andrew Odlyzko wrote that “most publishers claim that they will not survive and will be replaced by electronic subscription journals. Even some editors of the free journals agree with that assessment.”2 It’s been six years since he wrote that and free electronic journals, including First Monday, are still around. What do you see as the future for free electronic journals? EV: Free e-journals are free only because lots of people agree to do the work to make them possible. First Monday is only possible because of the large group of people and their institutions that support it. What that means is that people are giving up their time and giving up their resources to make it possible. So, First Monday is possible because we have, first of all, a group of editors who are willing to do the work for free. We have people who do the markup, editing, and the reading of manuscripts—all for free. They don’t expect compensation. We have UIC, an institution that supports the server and does that without expecting compensation. We have authors who willingly give us their works for free. They retain copyright to their works, but they give us their works. All of those people and the institutions behind those people make this possible and allow for the journal to continue being free. We also have readers around the world who take advantage of the fact that it is free. Not only is the current (newest) issue free, but all of the back issues are free, so readers can explore the magazine as much as they want. The success of First Monday is contingent on being free and openly accessible. If we change that model by charging something, even a few pennies, we would have some real problems with our readers. And I think some of our contributors and our editors would have some real
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problems continuing to do their work for First Monday. We feel very strongly about this model and will continue to try to do this. There are times when I certainly feel that all of us involved would love it if we were making enough money that we could just do First Monday exclusively. But, that’s a big pipe dream. We all enjoy doing First Monday the way we’re doing it. In some ways I see First Monday like an open source journal, like Linux, where we have all these people contributing to make this really good thing. If we changed it, what we would have would be quite different, maybe not as good. For the time being we’re going to try real hard to continue this way.
with even a picture of it in my head, so it’s something I’ve never really thought of too much. HC: Are you concerned about the prestige of the journal at all? EV: First Monday is cited very heavily. We have thousands of hyperlinks to it from other servers around the Web. If you go into Google and look at the links to First Monday, we have an astonishing number. It’s ranked very highly by search engines like Google. Citations to First Monday appear in all sorts of places, even in prestigious journals like Nature, Science, and other journals. So, I can’t say I’m not concerned about prestige. It doesn’t keep me awake at night. If we publish good papers in First Monday, prestige will come. I think we already have a certain prestige in our niche.
HC: What do you see as being the major advantages and disadvantages of being online entirely and not in print? EV: Being online means everyone has relatively instant access to First Monday wherever at any time. Being online shifts the printing burden to the reader. Being online—and that means every issue from the beginning—means easy access to the contents via search engines. Disadvantages? Monitors are not the best media. Computers and network connections can fail. Servers can be slow. But there is no way that First Monday could reach hundreds of thousands of readers in hundreds of places in any other way.
HC: Going back to when you said you couldn’t imagine a print version of First Monday, I have another question regarding electronic versus print formats. In 1994 you wrote an article in Computers & Libraries explaining the difficulties in reading text on a computer screen.3 EV: Oh, yes, absolutely.
HC: What would be different if First Monday were a print publication?
HC: Have things changed since then with higher resolutions or are people simply getting used to it?
EV: Part of my fear is if we had a dedicated staff, if I was doing First Monday and nothing else and I had a group of people working for me—say, a small staff of three or four people that were working on First Monday—I’m afraid we might actually ruin the magazine. We might actually do things to it that would either ruin its appearance or ruin the content. The very simplicity of First Monday makes it attractive. If we had a group of people who were dedicated to working on First Monday, I think we would make it much more complex, much more unattractive than it is now. The viability of First Monday for our readers is its simplicity, its innocent roots. Everything we try to do as far as improvements is a matter of trying to make it easier to use and more accessible. My fear is that we would do more harm than good.
EV: There are still problems reading from a computer screen because of flicker. The newer monitors, the flat screen monitors, have certainly reduced some of the readability issues that I brought up in that article. Print is still a much easier medium to read, especially when you have a journal like First Monday that publishes really long articles—articles that don’t often have graphics and articles that go on for awhile. I know that many people who use First Monday on a regular basis print the articles for their own files and reference. So, what we’ve done is shift the burden of creating a print journal to our users. That means that they in a sense are picking up that printing cost. They are making that a local decision rather than the publisher making that decision. I hope that monitor technologies continue to change in such a way that it will be easier to read from a screen. One of the things that we need to do at First Monday is to look at ways of making the magazine more readable. We’ve been looking at experimenting with putting drop quotes into articles to break up blocks of texts. We’ve been encouraging authors to put illustrations in their papers. We experiment with making the papers themselves more readable on the screen, but I think most people who read First Monday probably get about a page into it and then just decide to print it.
HC: Do you think that being electronic-only has affected First Monday’s prestige? EV: It’s an interesting point. I think if we were in print, First Monday might cater to a different kind of audience. The cost of printing would be quite astronomical. Munksgaard once estimated that printing First Monday would have meant hundreds of dollars a year for a subscription to cover printing, shipping, and mailing costs. Because it’s not in print, those costs are not there. Certainly there are other costs. There’s enormous cost for the time of everyone involved, but they’re all giving that time or their institutions are giving that time to make the journal possible. Certainly, maintaining and running the server is not free. Those costs are accommodated in some ways to make this model work and to make this journal work in a special way. A print version of First Monday . . . trying to imagine it . . . I’ve never been able to come up
HC: I know I do. The only things I read on screen are e-books on my PDA (personal digital assistant), but on the large computer screen, I print out anything I want to read. EV: Right. The basic issues that I brought up years ago are still there. There have been some slight improvements, but unfortunately not big improvements in making a computer screen work like paper.
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has been picked up in law journals recently because people have been trying to understand legislation surrounding the Internet. Certainly, I present one view. Not everyone agrees with my view, but I present one view of how legislation and law should treat the Internet and look at the Internet community. That was a fun paper to write. It was based on a talk that I did.5 It was fun doing the talk and writing the paper. Even though it’s very old, I’ve gotten a lot of response from readers. I should do a revision of it, even though some of it is still true.
HC: How has your role as a librarian influenced your role as an editor and vice versa? EV: That’s a good question. As an editor, being a librarian means that I have a bias toward papers that talk about information policies. Also, I’ve always had an interest in copyright, how it influences libraries, and the sort of public organizations that provide information for the public good. My library tendencies show up as an editor. I’m dependent on other editors for the more technical articles or articles in other areas where I’m less familiar, like economics on the Internet, programming, anthropology, or how people are using the Internet. My biases definitely come through. What I learn from First Monday is lots about other areas of use of the Internet that I wouldn’t normally know about. That makes me a better librarian. It certainly makes me a much better instructor because what I bring to the classroom or what I bring to the job is experience and familiarity with areas that I would never have known about. That is my personal compensation for doing all the work on First Monday— learning about those other areas. We have contributors to First Monday from at least thirty different countries. We have readers in 120 to 130 different countries. So I’ve gotten to know lots of people through First Monday in this virtual way. That’s made me both a better editor and a better librarian.
HC: You teach a number of Internet-related courses at Dominican University. What skills do you consider most important for library and information science students to acquire for work with today’s electronic resources? EV: The thing that I try to have most of the students do is not to be afraid; to make them not afraid of technology and to be willing to explore and willing to try something. If it breaks, it breaks, and you try again. The students I’m most proud of in these classes are students who will admit to me that they’re very technophobic, that they’re afraid of computers, that they don’t like computers. In some of the classes that I teach they learn basic Web design. They learn ten or fifteen commands in HTML, and they’re able to create some basic, simple Web pages. Watching those students gain control of their computer and their computer monitor and actually create something is really wonderful. Some of the students have really blossomed from those courses. The big picture that I try to get them to learn is that these technologies are something that they need to know about. What I tell them is that librarians will need to be information mechanics. They will need to be individuals who will help others with computers and information. They will have to fine-tune how somebody’s doing a search. They’ll have to get into the innards of a search strategy and figure them out. So, they really are these mechanics doing that. But, they’re bringing a sense of the broader issues that someone doing a search, working at the computer, with a program, or with a search engine may not understand. They bring special skills to that interaction with the patron. They need to take advantage of new technologies. In my class, I can’t tell them about new technologies because I don’t know what they’re going to be. What I want them to get from my classes is a level of comfort with technology and a level of confidence so that they use that confidence with new technologies in ways that I can’t even imagine. I see that happening. I see the transformation, especially with students who are afraid of technology and afraid of computers. It’s very flattering.
HC: Do you think you get more interaction, direct interaction, from your readers because you’re online? EV: Yes, I think I do. For instance, Clifford Lynch told me last year that he gets more responses, more queries, and more comments about his papers in First Monday than from anything else he’s published anywhere else. Other contributors to First Monday have repeated this remark consistently. That’s because we have such a broad readership. And, because it’s electronic, people are more comfortable writing to an author with a comment, either positive or negative, about what they’ve read. For the authors, that feedback allows them to think about brand new kinds of articles and research, and expand their ideas. As an editor, comments help me think about different directions for the journal and to explore topics that I might not have thought about. It’s the give and take of the electronic medium. The comfort of our readers to contact us and contribute their ideas is what really makes the magazine work, unlike other kinds of magazines. HC: You once wrote an article about the community of the Internet and laws regarding it. EV: Yes, that was published in First Monday called “Lex Networkia.”4
HC: Do you think that there are enough technologyrelated courses being taught right now? Or do you think technology needs to be more or less of a focus?
HC: Right. That article was actually heavily distributed on a mailing list I was on at the time. Everybody was talking about it when it came out in 1996. That mailing list is a very small social community like the one you describe. It was a very good article.
EV: Well, I think there’s a combination. A need for both the sort of practical technology practices—how to do XYZ with the Internet or XYZ with databases or a specific program. That learning has a certain utility, but not because you’re going to learn how to do these things
EV: Thank you. It’s still being read even though it is very old (on an Internet scale). That article, interestingly,
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and use them twenty years from now. The programs you’re learning now will not exist in twenty years, or they’ll be totally transformed. By learning certain programs and certain computer ways you’re building confidence with future computers and programs. That’s the important thing that you get out of these classes. The other aspect that more classes need to think about and that Kate Marek and I try to accomplish in our information policy class is to make students see the big picture— to think about the implications of changes in laws that will affect how libraries do their business and to make students aware that they have a voice so that they can do something as individuals about affecting policy. We need the sort of practical work with technology and policy issues to give students confidence in both areas: confidence in technology and confidence as a spokesperson for information policy to affect change—to protect those who won’t speak up, or can’t speak up, for themselves, and to make sure that information continues to be available and accessible for as many people as possible.
ticultural history and scholarship for a period of five hundred years from the oldest book in the collection and one of the first botanical books ever published (in 1483) to many books and journals published in the nineteenth century. The collection was originally owned by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Boston, which was founded in 1829 and had, at one point in the nineteenth century, the best botanical and horticultural library in the world. Through a variety of circumstances, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society made a decision to sell a portion of its library. The Chicago Botanic Garden was in the right place. Some of my staff was attending a meeting where they heard a rumor that this might be happening. They brought the information back to me. The Botanic Garden worked very quickly to proceed and see if this was true. It was true. We were able to complete the negotiations last summer with the deal completed in early fall 2002, and we moved the collection last fall. It took several semi trucks to move the entire collection. We’re studying ways in which the collection needs to be cataloged. So there’s lots of work that we’re doing on that. For cataloging, our staff is using library school students, some from Dominican University, some from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We’re looking at a variety of plant resources to help finish the cataloging, and we are planning exhibits. Also, we’re planning with a company from California called Octavo that does digitization of rare books to make some of the rare books available on CD-ROMs. They’ve worked with places like the Library of Congress and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Octavo creates spin-offs of their high quality images by photographing the books at ten thousand dots per inch, very detailed imaging. Other companies get those high quality images and then create other products like prints. So, we have a number of projects ahead—trying to get the collection cataloged, trying to think about exhibits that we can use with the collection, making the collection better known so that scholars will work with the collection. We want to familiarize ourselves with the collection. There are lots of interesting things in the collection that we’re discovering—letters, illustrations, and graphics that are just quite wonderful.
HC: Related to information policy, as well as to First Monday being electronic, who should have responsibility for archiving e-journals? EV: We have UIC, our current service provider, make multiple backups of First Monday, of the server, and I, personally, make backups as well. So, there are levels of backups made at an institutional level. I think most electronic publications are doing that. Archiving is really about the amount of education the people with whom you are working have. If you work with an Internet service provider or a person who doesn’t recognize the value of backups, then you shouldn’t be working with that person or that organization. It would be hard to make some big rule saying that the XYZ organization should be receiving all electronic backups. But, it may come to that. It may come to the point where you have an organization, like the Library of Congress, that says, “Once a year First Monday and all e-journals should send us a disk, a zip disk, or a CD-ROM, with all your backfiles on it.” It may come to that because, if e-journals really become much more common, we may need at some point some national or international clearinghouses that will provide access to backups in case something happens locally where a building is destroyed, and you lose all your backups. That may happen eventually, but it hasn’t happened yet. Right now it’s a personal, local responsibility issue.
HC: So the collection came to you uncataloged?
HC: Completely changing the topic. In late 2002 the library of the Chicago Botanic Garden acquired over four thousand rare books and journal titles. Is that correct?
EV: The journals were completely uncataloged. A portion of the books was cataloged, but they were not cataloged well. So, we’re going to have to recatalog them. The remaining portion of the books was not cataloged at all. So, we’re going to have to do a lot of work. Rare book and journal cataloging is laborious and will take some time.
EV: It acquired 2,219 rare books and 2,000 journals. Altogether about fifty thousand pounds of material.
HC: That’s all the questions I have for you. Thank you very much for meeting with me.
HC: Could you tell me a little bit about what was involved in that, and what is going on now?
Notes
EV: It’s a very interesting and neat collection because the collection provides a snapshot of botanical and hor-
1. Chicago Botanic Garden, http://www.chicago-botanic.org (5 August 2003).
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2. Andrew Odlyzko, “The Economics of Electronic Journals,” First Monday 2, no. 8, August 1997, http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/ issue2_8/odlyzko/index.html (5 August 2003).
4. Edward J. Valauskas, “Lex Networkia: Understanding the Internet Community,” First Monday 1, no. 4, October 1996, http://www.first monday.dk/issues/issue4/valauskas/ (5 August 2003).
3. Edward J. Valauskas, “Reading and Computers—Paper-Based or Digital Text: What’s Best?” Computers in Libraries 14, no. 1 (January 1994): 44–47.
5. Edward J. Valauskas, “Access Denied? Effects of Censorship, Copyright and the Network Culture on Electronic Access to Information.” Paper presented at Library and Information Technology Association’s President Program, New York, NY, July 1996.
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