This is interesting: CourseSmart For iPad: Free App With 90 Percent Of 'Core Textbooks' Available (http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/08/13/coursesmart-for-ipad-free-app-with-90-percent-of-core-textbooks-available/)

Having a little knowledge is dangerous thing. You have a very interesting challenge in your efforts to reign in costs while still making available valuable materials to students and others in a timely manner. It strikes me that the handling and control costs attached to your stack reduction initiative are a serious ongoing issue so doing something substantial about that right now could be very helpful.

So, knowing little about the challenge but always ready to jump in to see if something useful might eventually fall out, here are some observations / assumptions.

1. If the books are warehoused, even though they haven't been used in some time, it is likely to make their selection for use even lower. Would it be fair to assume the the publishers / authors of the items most likely to be subject to this initiative are likely not selling many copies at the moment?

2. If someone wants/needs a particular volume, time is of the essence.

3. Part of the goal is to expose students and researchers to all available pertinent literature on their given subject so they can obtain the widest possible viewpoint and level of understanding.

4. Warehousing costs a fraction per volume in comparison with picking and delivery on demand.

5. The huge battle over copyright and digitization (e.g. Google effort) will not be easily dealt with and certainly not any time soon. Small demand items will remain largely inaccessible particularly under current budgetary constraints and where your library initiative is likely to take things. If they don't get checked out when it is relatively simple (e.g. take it off of the shelf and use your library card) then having to request it, wait for it and then pick it up is potentially less likely?

6. Under old business cost modeling, digitization costs are normally high and cost recovery from potential ensuing digital sales would be very unlikely even if publishers and authors were to agree.

7. Most universities / colleges would have a large number of these items in their current inventories and therefore face the same challenge of space and costs - therefore it is likely that your initiative would be very well received.

8. Something has to be done and quickly to reduce the current budget expenditures represented by this issue given the current budget climate.

Here is a very basic rough idea - perhaps somethings or perhaps nothing :-)

-enlist the support of the authors / publishers of these works to allow for digitization.

-provide incentive for students to do the digitization work (under suitable direction) so that these costs are reduced to little or nothing - the students might even be allowed to participate in the business model in some form or manner for their efforts?

-spread the workload of digitization across institutions and student bodies allowing for large volumes of materials to be made available quickly while cutting down on duplication of efforts.

-create a library "application" (e.g. CourseSmart) that allows for easy access from current and future electronic reading devices - revenue sharing between project participants. This allows instant access when students or researchers need it.

-follow the Apple iTunes model of pricing each access under $1 so students can really afford to expand their research activities - lot's of ideas here . . .

-volumes can still be physically accessed through the library picking systems for free, BUT, there is a time delay. This is likely to further reduce physical requests if the electronic access is immediate. Handing and picking costs are substantially reduced while warehousing costs remain low and constant.

Some further assumptions / hopes.

1. If the authors / publishers of these items were to allow their lesser utilized volumes to be digitized, they COULD receive some positive cash flow - along with participating schools.

2. Catalogue comparisons could be run across participating institutions so that digitization work load could be spread and duplication of efforts eliminated.

3. We could use the example of the aforementioned iPad/iPhone app as a potential monetization model for our discussion.

4. If participating institutions, in collaboration with the publishers/authors, were to create an "access" application for the popular "reader" and computer platforms then access to these items could be easily tracked and money apportioned.

5. This application could be available globally so that the potential audience for access would be greatly increased. In this way, access costs could be kept very low so that any student, regardless of their financial situation, would have a very low barrier to participation.

6. This would open up access to important works to all.

Just some idle conjecture on a nice cloudy Saturday afternoon in the lake country in Ontario.

Your thoughts?

Ron Smith

In his paper on shared services, Professor Larson urges colleges and universities to implement the sharing of administrative and academic services as a way to help control future costs. He uses the archiving and shared access to books among nearby libraries as an example that has helped control costs. He advocates radical change and collaborative sharing as technology continues to impact libraries and reader access. He then recommends the example of libraries be applied across a range of campus services.

I have worked with Professor Larson over the past twelve years as a professional volunteer in his office, have collaborated on successful initiatives and co-authored a published paper. He brings remarkable insights into existing practices and has provided accurate forecasts into the ways that teaching can be enhanced by new technology. More than a decade ago, he saw video as soon becoming the primary method for interaction among people on the internet. Almost all other observers who saw any interactive use at all were largely focused on text-based methods. He also saw that many of the technological barriers such as internet speed, computer memory, and ease-of-use that inhibited early adopters would disappear much sooner than expected, including most places in the developed and developing world.

He has chosen shared library services as an example that has been undergoing meaningful improvement for decades with no letup in sight. His description of current library collaborations is not comprehensive. It can, however, be a reference for managers of many campus services seeking ways to collaborate with similar nearby institutions.

While at MIT, I was a co-founder of The Boston Consortium more than a decade ago. It now provides collaboration assistance to fifteen colleges and universities in the Greater Boston area. With cost control now a higher priority on campuses, the Consortium reports it has never been so busy. Its participatory working groups seek collaboration in some twenty areas of professional practice, including libraries and their use of information technology. Its long list of successful collaborations results from being a forum for both the discussion and implementation of process changes.

The location of our colleges and universities is the result of pre-20th century transportation and communications rather than 21st century learning practices and technology. Each school wants to provide a full range of administrative and academic services, yet some are too small to benefit from economies of scale. Consolidations among institutions or mergers are usually not options. I also note that such economies are often elusive, even at giant corporations when their systems need to be effective in responding to a wide range of decentralized demands.

The major barriers to more effective collaboration include the varying priority of cost controls among the institutions and the willingness to make changes when academic leaders are involved. We can say that faculty are never selected and rarely promoted based on their commitment to future cost controls, except as defined in their annual budgets. It may not even be an important factor in their later selection to leadership positions. Compared with corporate managers, faculty leaders are less likely to have either experience or an understanding of the wide range of issues surrounding cost controls in a large organization. Within our schools, a negative response to change, even from only one person or a small minority, may make implementation difficult or impossible. Many faculty leaders return to teaching and research after their administrative service, and are not isolated from the consequences of cost reductions. Win-win solutions frequently exist in collaborations among schools although these may not involve the kind of major changes sought by budget officers.

One of the major benefits to collaboration among institutions is for administrators to learn how the functions at their school compare with the functions at similar places. Efforts to quantify these comparisons seem less successful than those that are defined verbally with knowledge of specific institutional needs. Costs should influence new administrative processes and staffing at their creation. Like many of my colleagues, I became a reluctant expert on the failures of corporate consultants to make successful changes to the processes within higher education.

The next step for Professor Larson and others in implementing collaborative efforts among academic institutions is to more fully understand the successes and shortcomings of the past efforts. They should also review the history of cost control efforts within their own institutions. Senior academic leaders need to understand the functions within their institutions and the major processes that create the workloads for their administrators. Because large institutions often behave like each department is in its own silo, there should be an effort to achieve more internal collaboration at the same time as they are identifying opportunities for external relationships.

When active as a senior administrator, I was concerned with the increasing burden Federal regulations placed on administrative processes and the resulting increase in costs to comply. Processes may include the costs of duplicative efforts to assure compliance. Such familiar corporate efforts as reducing time to complete tasks, doing tasks only once in each cycle, and reducing first draft errors can also offer cost savings to not-for-profits.

Professor Larson provides a summary view of both past efforts at collaboration among local colleges and universities and the possibilities for future success. It deserves further research and I hope he will be an important part of this process.