1. All the King’s Horses and All the
King’s Men: College Libraries at
the Beginning of the Digital Age
David W. Lewis
NITLE
October 31, 2012
© 2012 David W. Lewis. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

2. Abstract:
This presentation will examine what the current state of
College Libraries. I will use the lens of Clayton Christensen’s
theories of disruptive innovation to attempt to determine
what jobs students and faculty will hire college libraries to do
and what theories we can use to look into the future and
make reasonable predictions about what is coming. A central
consideration will be the role of collections. Collections are of
prime importance because they are both where most of the
money goes and because they have shaped library practice
and values. They are core to how we see ourselves and how
others see us. But collections have large opportunity costs,
and if college libraries are to be successful in the next decade
they must shed some of these costs, without impacting their
users, and reinvest them in new services.

3. “That is what real revolutions are like. The old
stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put
in its place.”
Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” March 2009. Available at:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
Clay Shirky

4. Today’s Agenda
1. Importance of Theory
2. Disruption in Our World
3. Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation
Theory
4. What Job are We being Hired to Do?
5. Collections
6. Questions to Think About

5. The Importance of Theory
• Data is only available about the past
• Every time we take an action it is based on a
theory
• The lens of theory lets you see the future
• Usually our operating theory is that the
future will be a continuation of the past

6. The Importance of Theory
• The future will be a continuation of the past
is not the theory we need
• Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation
theory is a much better lens because it fits
our time

7. “Disruptive Innovation transforms a product
that historically was so expensive and
complicated that only a few people with a lot
of money and a lot of skill had access to it. A
disruptive innovation makes the product so
much more affordable and accessible that a
much larger population have access to it.”
Clayton Christensen, “Disruptive Innovation Explained,” HarvardBusiness, May 30, 2012. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrMAzCHFUU&feature=related

8. Our World is Being
Disrupted

9. 1. The Big Shift
2. Ray Kurzweil
3. Clay Shirky

10. The Big Shift
John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, “Measuring the forces of long-term change: The 2009 Shift Index,” Deloitte
Center for the Edge, 2009. Available at: http://www.johnhagel.com/shiftindex.pdf

11. The Big Shift

12. The Big Shift

13. The Big Shift
Disruption Space

14. The Big Shift
• First Order Effect: Technology substantially
reduces barriers to entry and barriers to
movement on a global scale
• Second Order Effect: Competition intensifies
on a global scale
• Third Order Effect: As competition intensifies,
instability and uncertainty increase

15. The Big Shift
• Organizations have generally been unable to
apply the capacities made possible by the
technology to increase performance
• Power moves to consumers
• Power moves to trained and skilled
individuals
• Creates organizational and personal stress

16. See: Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” March 7, 2001, available at: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-
accelerating-returns
Ray Kurzweil and “The
Law of Accelerating
Returns”
When a technology becomes digital the pace of
change becomes exponential.

17. See: Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” March 7, 2001, available at: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-
accelerating-returns

18. See: Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” March 7, 2001, available at: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-
accelerating-returns

19. See: Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” March 7, 2001, available at: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-
accelerating-returns

20. “The moment we are living through, the
moment our historical generation is living
through, is the largest increase in expressive
capacity in human history.”
Clay Shirky, “How Social Media Can Make History,” TED Talk, June 2009. Available at:
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html
Clay Shirky

23. Disruptive Innovation
Theory

24. Disruptive Innovation
Clayton Christensen

25. Disruptive Innovation
• The capacity for customers to use new
products and features increases, but at a
slow rate
• Products improve faster than customers can
use the improvements
• Products that are initially not good enough
become too good

26. Time

27. Time

28. Time
Undershot
Customer
Overshot
Customer

29. Disruptive Innovation
• Undershot Customer
– Wants and will pay new features
– Where money can be made
• Overshot Customer
– Doesn’t care about new features – performance
oversupply
– Basis of competition changes
– Wants product to be cheaper, faster, easier
– Commoditization

30. Time

31. Time

32. Disruptive Innovation
• Starts off as not being good enough for
established customers so they don’t care
about the product
• Often creates a new group of users who did
not have the time, expertise, or money to use
the established product
• Begins by competing against non-
consumption

33. Disruptive Innovation
• Needs
–New Technology (simplified solution)
–New Business Model
–New Value Chain
• How products become cheaper, faster, and
easier

34. Why can’t established firms adapt
disruptive innovations?

35. Business Models
Value Proposition
A product that helps
customers do more
effectively, conveniently and
affordably a job they’ve been
trying to do

36. Business Models
Value Proposition
A product that helps
customers do more
effectively, conveniently and
affordably a job they’ve been
trying to do
Resources
People, technology, products,
facilities, equipment and cash
that are required to deliver
this value to customers

37. Value Proposition
A product that helps
customers do more
effectively, conveniently and
affordably a job they’ve been
trying to do
Resources
People, technology, products,
facilities, equipment and cash
that are required to deliver
this value proposition to
customers
Processes
Ways of working together to
address recurrent tasks in a
consistent way: training,
development, budgeting,
planning, etc.
Business Models

38. Business Models
Value Proposition
A product that helps
customers do more
effectively, conveniently and
affordably a job they’ve been
trying to do
Resources
People, technology, products,
facilities, equipment and cash
that are required to deliver
this value proposition to
customers
Processes
Ways of working together to
address recurrent tasks in a
consistent way: training,
development, budgeting,
planning, etc.
Profit Formula/Values
Assets and fixed cost
structure, margins,
professional values, career
paths, etc.

39. Business Models
Value Proposition
A product that helps
customers do more
effectively, conveniently and
affordably a job they’ve been
trying to do
Resources
People, technology, products,
facilities, equipment and cash
that are required to deliver
this value proposition to
customers
Processes
Ways of working together to
address recurrent tasks in a
consistent way: training,
development, budgeting,
planning, etc.
Profit Formula/Values
Assets and fixed cost
structure, margins,
professional values, career
paths

40. Business Models
• Established values make in nearly impossible
for organizations to create disruptive
innovation
• Separation is the only strategy that works
• Firms that survive sacrifice business units
that don’t

41. Value Chain
Product or Service
Sales and Service
Supplier
Customer

42. Value Chain
Product or Service
Sales and Service
Supplier
Customer
NEW Product

43. Value Chain
Product or Service
Sales and Service
Supplier
Customer
NEW Product

44. Value Chain
Product or Service
Sales and Service
Supplier
Customer
NEW Product
NEW Supplier
Sales and Service
NEW Customer

45. Value Chain
OLD Customer
NEW Product
NEW Supplier
Sales and Service
NEW Customer

46. Response to Disruptive Innovation
• Cramming — Try to make the innovation
work within old organization processes and
culture
This rarely works
• Move up market — Focus make a better
product for the best customers and concede
lower end
Eventually the market tops out

47. What Job are We being
Hired to Do?

48. Ronald Harry Coase
“The Nature of the Firm” Economica 4
(16): 386–405 1937
Question: If markets are efficient, why do we
have firms?

49. Ronald Harry Coase
“The Nature of the Firm” Economica 4
(16): 386–405 1937
Question: If markets are efficient, why do we
have firms?
Answer: Transaction Costs

50. Ronald Harry Coase
“The Nature of the Firm” Economica 4
(16): 386–405 1937
• Where the market has high transactions
costs firms bring activities in house

51. “The Nature of the Firm” and Libraries
• In the past the market could not answer
questions
• Now answering many kinds of questions is
easy
• What is hard now is evaluating what you find

52. “The Nature of the Firm” and Libraries
• In the past the market could not manage
collections
• Now access to many kinds of collections is
easy
• What is hard now is curation and
preservation of “unpublished” and special
materials

53. Old Job:
Provide documents to
users by building a local
collection

54. Our approach to collections has
created our values and it is how
others judge us.
Changing this will be very hard!!

55. Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services, Advisory Board Company 2011. Available at:
http://www.theconferencecircuit.com/wp-content/uploads/Provosts-Report-on-Academic-Libraries2.pdf

56. Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services, Advisory Board Company 2011. Available at:
http://www.educationadvisoryboard.com/pdf/23634-EAB-Redefining-the-Academic-Library.pdf
10 M
20 M
22 M30 M ?

57. Two Drivers of Change in Collections
1. Open Access
2. Change from Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time

58. Two Drivers of Change in Collections
1. Open Access - Journals
2. Change from Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time
- Books

59. Open Access
“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of
charge, and free of most copyright and licensing
restrictions. OA removes price barriers (subscriptions,
licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission
barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions).”
– Peter Suber
Peter Suber, “Open Access Overview,” at: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

60. Open Access
• Open Access is a disruptive innovation (Clayton
Christensen)
– New technology
– New business model
– Starts out as an inferior product
– Improves over time and its advantages make
it dominant
– Adoption follows an S-curve not a straight line
David W. Lewis, “The Inevitability of Open Access,” College & Research Libraries September 2012.
Available at: http://crl.acrl.org/content/73/5/493.full.pdf+html

61. Open Access
0.0%
10.0%
20.0%
30.0%
40.0%
50.0%
60.0%
70.0%
80.0%
90.0%
100.0%
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
Figure 3: Pace of Substitution of Direct Gold OA for
Subscription Journals (normal scale)
Laakso, et. al. Estimates
S-curve Extrapolation Based on 2000-2009
S-curve Extrapolation Based on 2005-2009
David W. Lewis, “The Inevitability of Open Access,” College & Research Libraries September 2012.
Available at: http://crl.acrl.org/content/73/5/493.full.pdf+html

62. From January 1, 2012 to October 25, 2012
18,414 Articles Published

63. eLife is a researcher-driven initiative for the very best in science and
science communication. We promote rapid, fair, and more
constructive review. We will use digital media and open access to
increase the influence of published works. We commit to serving
authors and advancing careers in science. At eLife,
Publishing is just the beginning.

64. If we can set a goal to sequence the human
genome for $99... then why not $99 for
scholarly publishing?
PeerJ is an Open Access publisher of scholarly articles. We aim to
drive the costs of publishing down, while improving the overall
publishing experience, and providing authors with a publication venue
suitable for the 21st Century.

66. Available at: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-Elsevier.pdf

67. Implications of Open Access
1. Changes in review practices because space is
not an issue
2. “Journal” becomes less important than the
article
3. Large sites replace individual journals, for
example PLoS One or SSRN

68. Implications of Open Access
1. As more journals become open access, the
library will have to pay for fewer journals
2. Escape from the grip of monopolistic
publishers
3. Libraries in their role of information
providers, won’t be part of the system

70. Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time
• In a typical research library 50% of the books
that are purchased never circulate
• In the past this made sense as an insurance
policy

71. Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time
• Now nearly any book can be purchased at
any time with very quick delivery
• Why purchase before the user needs an item
if you don’t have to?
• Since past use is the best predictor of future
use, books users “select” are likely to get use
in the future

72. • Print books delivered nearly
as quickly as digital files
• Digital readers nearly as good
as print books
For what might come next, see: Mike Matas, “A Next-Generation Digital Book,” TED Talk, March 2011. Available at:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mike_matas.html

73. Implications of
Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time
1. Aggressively work at not buying books that
will never be used
2. Book purchases will decline
3. But impact on readers will be minimal
1. Will impact scholarly publishers by reducing
revenue
They don’t see this coming

74. Questions to Think
About

75. 1. What do we give up?
• Disruptive Innovations have replaced our
expensive and hard to use services
• Can we free ride on commercial services or
other libraries?
• Implications for our role on campus
• Implications for the status of the campus

76. 2. What Do We Do Differently?
• Can aggressively pursued sustaining
innovations keep us ahead of our
competitors?
• Can we collaborate to achieve greater scale
and efficiency?
• Can we disrupt our own services?

77. 3. What New Things Can We Do?
• Can we disrupt others?
• Are there new jobs we can be hired to do?

78. “That is what real revolutions are like. The old
stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put
in its place.”
Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” March 2009. Available at:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
Clay Shirky

79. Questions?
Comments
© 2012 David W. Lewis. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.