THE reasons for defending access to information can sound abstract: “There’s a lot of abstraction when you’re doing policy at a global scale,” says Jennie Rose Halperin, Executive Director of Library Futures.

“There’s a lot of conceptualisation – that things need to scale, or they need to be big, or they need to hit with wide-ranging impact. This makes the policy work abstract, but even more crucial that it shows its value for real people.”

The practical solutions to some of the problems that Library Futures (a project of New York University’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy) can feel distant and convoluted – like developing legislation to stop publishers side-stepping existing laws that protect libraries.

This includes the ebook bills that have been recently amended to follow Library Futures’ suggestions and which are now making their way through the state legislatures of Hawaii and Massachusetts (with more states in the pipeline).

Like their predecessor bills in New York and Maryland, the publishing industry will try and stop them. But the form of these bills has been able to evolve due the stamina of the US library advocacy ecosystem which, as well as being proactive, has carried on despite setbacks like the recent court case against Internet Archive.

Fundamental not abstract

Jennie has personal experience that keeps the abstractions and complexities of the work tethered to reality.

“My mother was sick for 26 years before she passed. In 2018 she had her final health scare. I had doctors calling me asking questions that I couldn’t look up. I couldn’t gain access to many of the materials on her disease.

“Loving someone and caring for someone with a very rare disease while knowing there is research out there that I can’t access didn’t feel right at all. Some of the things we went through were things that we shouldn’t have had to go through, and I do think that’s at least partially because of the way that research and knowledge information are not accessible.

“Heather Joseph, one of our board members, says it best – ‘access to information is increasingly available to people, not through a library card or a student ID, but instead through a credit card’. What we’re seeing is that quality information is increasingly economically inequitable.”

Digital community

In her career Jennie has explored many aspects of the profession from traditional library work to digital and library technology. This continues at Library Futures where she says the work she is most proud of is at the community level.

Digital communities have always played a vital part in her experience and views. She says: “I’ve always been interested in communities, particularly online communities. I think, like a lot of people in their thirties, I very much grew up in online communities.”

But they have their limitations – particularly around hard facts. This became clearer during her mother’s illness. In the very first blog post on the Library Futures website, Jennie explained how that information landscape was a treacherous place, even for experts.

“Despite my training as a librarian, I informed myself with faulty, surveilled, and incomplete information because I had no choice. As she slipped away from me, I felt first-hand the impact of withholding publicly funded information from people who need it. Our stories shine a spotlight on the avarice of an industry that places the blame on libraries, authors, researchers, or readers for the increasing corporatisation of science and the useful arts.”

The opposition

So what is Library Futures up against? “Publishers exist to create profit and libraries exist to provide better and more equitable access. For hundreds of years these two aims were complimentary but as the publishers have become more squeezed and have felt their role in society slipping, their aims have become oppositional.”

Most of the squeezing has been done by Amazon: “In their book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say the publishing industry gave away the keys to the castle to Amazon, creating a chokepoint, an intermediary between the company, the artist, the library, the resource and the payment, effectively handing over control of the book market to a big corporation.

“It seems like publishers don’t know what to do in the digital market at this point. One of the research projects coming out of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy (which Library Futures has recently joined) is a large-scale research paper on the publishing industry and where they want to move digitally.”

The work

In the Summer of 2021 two states – Maryland and New York – voted for laws that required publishers to offer “reasonable” ebook licences to public libraries if they sold ebooks to consumers in those states. The bills both had strong democratic support – in Maryland the vote was unanimous, in New York it was almost unanimous.

But the Association of American Publishers sued the state of Maryland, saying the law created a “shadow Copyright Act” that bypassed or pre-empted the federal copyright law. The challenge stopped the bills, and later copyright regulators and a judge accepted the publishers’ arguments. The library community does not agree with those rulings but acknowledges that a challenge at the federal level could take many years of litigations and appeals, while libraries still suffer.

The original bill was designed by the Maryland Library Association and not-for-profit organisation Reader’s First. It had two parts – one was to stop publishers refusing to lease ebooks to libraries at all, the other was to make sure that the contracts were reasonable when they did. The first is the area that has proven most problematic.

Library Futures, which was only established six months before the Maryland bill was stopped, proposed a new model bill, published in June 2022, which focuses on the second part – the contract. A number of states that had already submitted bills like those in Maryland and New York have amended them along the lines suggested by Library Futures.

“The ebooks bills are springing up to ameliorate the worst abuses of contracts,” Jennie says. “We argue that many of the licensing agreements with libraries are exploitative – and that is why we are approaching the ebook and digital ownership and policy space and debate a contracts perspective.”

She explains that focussing on contracts is a new approach, adding: “Former bills, like the ones in Maryland, could be argued to operate much more in the realm of copyright law. States can’t regulate a federally mandated rule like copyright.” She goes on to say: “Kyle K. Courtney, Library Futures co-founder, had previous experience of the bill. The legislation he and Policy Fellow Juliya Ziskina have worked on was released in the summer and since then many states have been working to introduce these bills.”

News deserts

Alongside its legal expertise, Library Futures is also developing other areas of advocacy. “When we began, we were clear we needed a new kind of advocacy organisation that was really going to push the limit and the window on what library advocacy should look like. Libraries face unprecedented challenges – there are unionisation struggles, issues of book banning and labour and surveillance, and for us, we seek to always be at the front of the issue curve and produce the most cutting-edge research and advocacy.”

One of the more experimental projects coming from Library Futures explores the relationship between local libraries and local newspapers in Albany, NY, the two main sources of information in communities. Declining trust and funding in local news has led to “news deserts,” which – according to a paper from the Hussman School of Journalism – lack “the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”

In Albany, while there remains a comprehensive local paper, the number of local news sources has declined precipitously in the last 20 years. The project used a methodology called public-powered journalism.

Jennie said: “The local news work is our primary special project. We wanted to create extremely tangible and practical projects with the news because it is such a huge issue for libraries. We found the connections we supported between librarians and local reporters over the course of the seven months were invaluable.”

Universal problems

Jennie believes the primary and most immediate threat to libraries comes from corporate players and profit-seeking in information spaces, saying: “These licences take the power out of the hands of the individual libraries and individual communities and give it to a private company. We have democratic checks and balances that are overridden by corporations.

“If a company’s ultimate goal is to make profit and not provide information resources to communities it overrides a lot of the democratic systems that are in place. It makes it much harder for individual librarians and institutions that uphold quality information access for communities to do their jobs.”

Money

The extent to which these corporations take taxpayer money is another threat to citizens whatever their politics: “It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you come from, everyone wants to protect libraries, everyone wants to use taxpayer money effectively. And one of the arguments regarding ebook licensing that I think is really salient, besides access, is that it is just a poor use of taxpayer money.”

She gives an example from a New Yorker magazine article about how much more the New York Public Library spent on digital copies of Barack Obama’s book than on physical copies. She says: “A library might be paying $54 for a single licence, for a one at a time lend, for a physical book that might have cost them $15.”

And the questions go much deeper. “I freelanced as a digital reference librarian for the state of North Carolina for much of graduate school. I would talk to students all the time, and many of the resources they needed weren’t there, they just weren’t available to them because their libraries couldn’t afford them. The question is not whether or not a company should be making money on research, but rather, who has access? Is the profit margin reasonable? Was that research publicly funded? All publicly funded research should be publicly accessible, there shouldn’t be any nuance in that.”

UK and Europe

In the UK and Europe, she points to #ebooksos and KR21 (see page 51) as partners. “Johanna Anderson’s work in particular shows the power of individuals to just say ‘enough is enough, this is ridiculous’ and she eloquently demonstrates how that work needs to be translated into meaningful public policy. I think KR21 is really starting to ask that question within a pretty complicated landscape across Europe. I can’t imagine doing this work across different member states with different languages. The message remains clear, and the goals remain clear, but the terrain is incredibly disparate.”

The legislative ebook campaign by US library advocacy groups – in which Library Futures plays a vital role – provides encouragement for library services elsewhere struggling with the obstacles devised by the publishing industry.

She said: “Every institution needs to analyse its own risk. The threat of litigation, as publishers have shown over and over again, is definitely real. However, at the same time, the question is whether lending out a digital object one at a time to your patrons is a big risk– each institution has to decide for themselves. At the same time, libraries must ask themselves if restricted digital collections put them on the right side of history? Who are you empowering – patrons or corporations?”