Hunh. I think I'm going to email Rosemary Feal <rfeal@mla.org> and suggest that the password thing is not going to scale very well. - Steve is older than ever

She is the one who commented on the Inside Higher Ed post. But definitely! Let us know if you hear anything useful? - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

Yeah, that's why I'm emailing her--she seems like the point person. Here's what I wrote: "I read the article on Inside Higher Ed about the new edition of the MLA Handbook. I appreciated your quick reply in the comments there to someone's query about library use of the online portion of the Handbook, but I wonder if those "librarian accounts" will scale for most libraries..." - Steve is older than ever

"...I'm guessing that for the copies we purchase for the stacks we'll want to write the login on the inside front cover, or something equally inelegant. My institution is relatively small; I expect R1 Universities will have an even tougher time with this one-book-one-login plan." - Steve is older than ever

"Would it not make more sense to offer institutions site-wide access for a small annual fee? Those who didn't think it was worth it to pay the fee could limp along with the logins, but I expect most colleges of any size at all would happily pay a reasonable subscription fee based on FTE." - Steve is older than ever

I'm no longer a decision-maker for stuff like this, but I would be a bit miffed to pay a license fee for a book. For the *examples* of the book especially! Is that just me getting curmudgeonly in my old age? We buy the book, we get the content. If online content is part of book, it's part of book, part of what we are paying for when we pay for the book. Libraries pay the same for books as individuals. (I think I see this as the further erosion of the rights which allow libraries to be in business at all.... - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

Ok side comment -- I'm bummed that there is no easy way to email a link to a discussion thread... I'd love to have my colleagues see the discussion going on here (there are several MLA-centric peeps at MPOW) -- I'm away, not logged into my email right now, and would love to send a link to this with a click and an address or two and another click /end threadjack - Aaron the Librarian

Yeah, it's dopey. But I'd rather they just put the whole book online and did license fees. And you do get the online content for the book, you just have to keep track of their dumb login. It's not like they'll make the online stuff available for free. - Steve is older than ever

the idea of having to manage a password for this gives me migraines. - Chad Haefele from twhirl

wowza, big changes - marthalib

@Aaron the Librarian - can they even *see* the discussion without being logged in? - Connie Crosby

Connie, you don't need to be logged in to see a public entry like this one. Rudy's account is private, but she posted this to a public room, so this is all visible by anyone, FF account or no. - Steve is older than ever

Okay, thanks. For some reason I thought this was a private room. I agree, though, difficult to find old conversations and go back to them. Apparently FriendFeed was not invented by a librarian. :-P - Connie Crosby

Connie, I'm a little surprised that my private feed is public in here, although it makes perfect sense, now that I think it through.... - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

How to become totally irrelevant, MLA. Good going. Our students buy a writing handbook that has MLA, APA, Chicago, and CBE. They only ask to see the MLA if they have something odd and obscure. Well, I will gladly say "make it up, whatever" rather than handle a stupid password. (Chances are their teacher won't be able to find their password either, so who's gonna check? - barbara fister

Rudi, I agree a site license to a single book is an inelegant solution for many, but for distance ed institutions like us, such a purchase option would be invaluable, assuming the site license cost wasn't too high. We normally send students who haven't been required to buy a print version by their program to online secondary sources like Hacker, but it's becoming clear those sources are becoming quickly outdated. - Dana Longley

The Hacker is outdated, but is being updated as we speak (or whatever it is we do here). I do the library part and literally sent in the MS for the new edition this morning. It takes quite a while for the finished product to go online, though. I wish they gave me the permissions and let me update it on the fly, but ... with no copyeditor cleaning it up, it would probably be full of typos and citation errors. - barbara fister

we would definitely want an IP-authenticated site license for an online book like this at MPOW. Haven't seen the demo, but questions about MLA citation format are so common, and we have ~20,000 FTE ... and a single login & password is very clunky. We buy similar licenses for other kinds of books. I'll be curious to follow this thread. - Stephanie_GoBigBlue!

Sounds like it's just me, and that makes me sad. Libraries can exist because of legal privileges surrounding rights of first purchase: we buy the book, we can loan it. Licensing content has seriously eroded out abilities to do our job affordably and sustainably, and if we are already at a point where site licensing books is a shrugoff, then we've accepted our own demise. Libraries will no longer be legally possible, they will just be cash funnels to the vendors for vendor content, period. Makes me sad. - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

Rudi, I apologize if I'm misunderstanding, but in our case (Empire State College), we have no physical library; we have all distance learners. Having an affordable site license is our only option. If we could simply buy 1 print copy & offer access to all our users via IP auth. that would be great, but I suspect that would kill MLA's profits & incentive for making the publication available. The only other option for us is to require each student to purchase a copy. - Dana Longley

Dana, obviously a fully virtual library is going to have different needs for content packages! But something like this book, it's still a physical book and only *parts* of it are online, so the print book itself is the part that's getting under my skin. We buy the book, we get the rights to loan it. If part of the book is digital, I don't see why we can't 'loan" that out too. It's our fight to fight, as libraries. Unless it's already a lost cause. - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

Rudy, you *can* loan it. With the password attached to the book. - Steve is older than ever

Rudi, I think the online version does contain the full text. From the Inside Higher Ed article: "The password-protected Web site includes the full (and searchable) text of the handbook, plus 200 online-only examples, and a series of 30-plus-step narratives..." But I agree - if you loan out the print book, the loanee should have access to the online-only stuff too. - Dana Longley

Steve, if I'm reading it right, an account has to be set up and the TOS specifically forbids sharing libraries the password. ...We can do it, but when we buy the service we're saying it's OK to limit it like that.... - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

Looks like I need to just order one and find out. :) - Steve is older than ever

Picking up on Rudi's larger point - yes, libraries are changing. What percentage of our budgets go to temporary access to walled gardens? There's no public asset built as we do that. I think we've more or less decided anything old is useless, anyway. The closest we come to championing the virtues of information in the public sphere is the OA movement - but meanwhile, we spend gazillions on temporary licenses - sometimes to proprietary versions of public stuff, like ERIC and PubMed. Wha??? - barbara fister

Beating up on a dead horse, Library legal experts, is this even legal?? "The activation code in the copy permits the first owner to create an account (a user name—which will always be an e-mail address—and password) for use of the Site by the first owner during the life of the edition. Authorized Users are not permitted to transfer their accounts to anyone, even to people to whom they sell their copies of the MLA Handbook" - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

I know I'm fuzzy on this, but I recall from my library school days that the rights of first ownership are the legal principles that allow libraries to exist. Does it matter a whit, legally, if MLA wants to abrogate those specifically in it's TOS (where the above was pasted from)? - RudĩϐЯaЯïan