an interview with edward j. valauskas

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0098-7913/03$–see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.PII: S0098-7913(03)00107-2

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 Li-brary and Plant Information Office of the Chicago Botanic Garden and chief editorof

First Monday

. Valauskas discusses the issues surrounding producing e-journals, aswell as the skills librarians will need to work with changing technologies in the fu-ture. Valauskas also describes the Chicago Botanic Garden’s recent acquisition of acollection of rare historical books and journals about botany and horticulture fromthe Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Serials Review 2003; 29:305–310.

© 2003 Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Edward J. Valauskas is chief editor of

First Monday

, apeer-reviewed, monthly journal published on the Inter-net about the Internet. He is the manager of the Libraryand Plant Information Office of the Chicago BotanicGarden. In 1993 he founded and is principal of InternetMechanics, a consulting group providing assistance tocorporations, government agencies, nonprofit associa-tions, and others about the Internet. Valauskas has au-thored many articles and written and edited four booksabout the Internet and technology’s effects on and uses inlibraries and the classroom. He is a senior fellow in theGraduate School of Library and Information Science atDominican University in River Forest, Illinois. He was aninstructor at the International Centre for InformationManagement Systems & Services at Copernicus Univer-sity in Torun, Poland, and an adjunct instructor at thegraduate library schools of the University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign and Emporia State University (Kan-sas). He has served on the board of directors for theLibrary & Information Technology Association (LITA)and the governing board of the International Federationof Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). He hasalso served on the North Suburban Library System (Illi-nois) board of trustees.

Heather Cannon

(HC): You’ve held a number of rolesin different enterprises and on different committees.What are you currently involved in?

Edward Valauskas

(EV): Well, there are a couplethings 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 horti-cultural questions to the public, to staff, and to profes-sionals around the world. The Library and Plant Infor-mation Office answers approximately forty thousandquestions a year about horticulture and botany. There isa rich variety of questions from the very basic ones tovery esoteric and scholarly questions. That certainlykeeps me busy, along with building up the collections ofthe library. We just acquired a rare book collection sothat’s something else we’re also working on.

If you’re interested in knowing about e-journals, wehave on the Chicago Botanic Garden Website an elec-tronic magazine called

Current Books on Gardening andBotany

which appears six times a year.

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It’s a reviewmagazine about new books on gardening and botany. Wehave about twenty-five reviewers, both volunteers andstaff here at the Botanic Garden. We review thirteen totwenty books each issue, covering largely botanical, hor-ticultural, and landscape architectural books. It’s fundoing that, getting the word out about some books thatpeople wouldn’t normally know about.

I teach a couple of Internet courses each semester atthe Graduate School of Library and Information Scienceat Dominican University and one course a semester dur-ing the summer. Kate Marek and I teach classes on infor-mation policy. This semester I’m doing a class new forme, a science reference class. In the fall, I taught a history ofprinting class, actually at the Botanic Garden, and studentsworked with some of the rare books in this collection.

Cannon

is a Graduate Student at Dominican University’sGraduate School of Library and Information Science, RiverForest, IL 60305; e-mail: [email protected].

Serial Conversations

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McElroy / Serials Review 29/4 (2003) 305–310

HC: Is this a new course?

EV: No, it’s a course that’s been offered before, but ithad not been taught in awhile. The course is still the tra-ditional course, but it met one weekend a month and stu-dents came in Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sundaymorning.

I also work on an e-journal called

First Monday

. I wasthe founder of this journal in 1996, and I am also thechief editor. It’s a monthly journal about the Internet. Itpublishes five or six articles each issue, plus book re-views, and an occasional interview.

HC: How was

First Monday

started?

EV: It’s a good story. I was interested in publishing inpart because of my work on a copyright committee. I waschair of the American Library Association (ALA) Copy-right Subcommittee, which reported to the ALA Commit-tee on Legislation. I was involved in the early and mid-90swith efforts to review how copyright might be affectedby a more accessible Internet. In 1993 President Clintonestablished the Information Infrastructure Task Force(IITF) to describe the administration’s vision for the Na-tional Information Infrastructure (NII). There was an of-ficial committee that was looking at copyright, the Work-ing Group on Intellectual Property Rights, and I was oneof the official representatives for libraries to that group.At the hearings for those meetings, I was frustrated bythe publishers and their concerns about copyright andthe Internet. They had concerns that the Internet woulddestroy their works and lead to widespread piracy. I kepttalking about some of the ways that the Internet could ac-commodate copyright. I then began to formulate an ideaabout a journal. It would be a journal that would only be onthe Internet, freely available, and the authors, not the pub-lishers, would actually retain the copyright to all theworks published in the journal. Most of the publishersthought that it was a goofy premise for a scholarly journal.

In 1995 I had a chance to talk to some of the seniorstaff at Munksgaard, a Danish publisher. At that timeMunksgaard was publishing a number of scientific andmedical journals, but they were also publishing a libraryjournal called

Libri

. My wife is an editor of

Libri

eventhough Munksgaard doesn’t publish it anymore. So, theywere visiting my wife and talking to her about

Libri

.They made an offhand remark and said, “Well, Ed, doyou have any ideas about journals?” I said, “I’ve actuallyhad 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 elec-tronic or Internet publishing at that point in 1995. Theydidn’t want to risk any of their traditional journals, theirprint journals, by transforming them into an electronicInternet journal. For them the idea was to do a new jour-nal to gain the experience of doing electronic publishingand 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 involvedfrom the beginning were Esther Dyson and Rishab Ghosh,

who at the time was in India in Delhi, but now is in Hol-land at the University of Maastricht. Esther Dyson, oftencalled the most powerful woman in computing, has herown consulting firm in Manhattan. In October 1995 wehad a meeting with Esther Dyson, Anders Geersten, whowas vice-president of journals, and myself to talk aboutthe journal. At that meeting we settled on a name,

FirstMonday

, its frequency, and a plan of production. Munks-gaard did the initial design which we’ve largely retained.We then started working on content. We spent a longtime trying to find really good papers for the first issue.The journal first appeared at the International WorldWide Web Conference in Paris in May of 1996. In 1998Munksgaard decided that it had learned as much as itcould and wanted to sell

First Monday

. Esther, Rishab,and I were receiving some royalties from Munksgaardand 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 oflibraries of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).Sharon agreed to sponsor a server for

First Monday

atUIC. So, we moved it from Copenhagen to Chicago andstarted publishing locally, starting with the first issue inJanuary 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 amonthly basis.

HC: In “The Economics of Electronic Journals” in

FirstMonday

, Andrew Odlyzko wrote that “most publishersclaim that they will not survive and will be replaced byelectronic subscription journals. Even some editors of thefree journals agree with that assessment.”

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It’s been sixyears since he wrote that and free electronic journals, in-cluding

First Monday

, are still around. What do you seeas the future for free electronic journals?

EV: Free e-journals are free only because lots of peopleagree to do the work to make them possible.

First Mon-day

is only possible because of the large group of peopleand their institutions that support it. What that means isthat people are giving up their time and giving up their re-sources to make it possible. So,

First Monday

is

possiblebecause we have, first of all, a group of editors who arewilling to do the work for free. We have people who dothe markup, editing, and the reading of manuscripts—allfor free. They don’t expect compensation. We have UIC,an institution that supports the server and does that with-out expecting compensation. We have authors who will-ingly give us their works for free. They retain copyright totheir works, but they give us their works. All of thosepeople and the institutions behind those people make thispossible and allow for the journal to continue being free.We also have readers around the world who take advan-tage of the fact that it is free. Not only is the current(newest) issue free, but all of the back issues are free, soreaders can explore the magazine as much as they want.The success of

First Monday

is contingent on being freeand openly accessible. If we change that model by charg-ing something, even a few pennies, we would have somereal problems with our readers. And I think some of ourcontributors 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 continueto try to do this. There are times when I certainly feel thatall of us involved would love it if we were making enoughmoney that we could just do

First Monday

exclusively.But, that’s a big pipe dream. We all enjoy doing

First Mon-day

the way we’re doing it. In some ways I see

First Monday

like an open source journal, like Linux, where we have allthese people contributing to make this really good thing.If we changed it, what we would have would be quite dif-ferent, maybe not as good. For the time being we’re goingto try real hard to continue this way.

HC: What do you see as being the major advantages anddisadvantages of being online entirely and not in print?

EV: Being online means everyone has relatively instant ac-cess to

First Monday

wherever at any time. Being onlineshifts the printing burden to the reader. Being online—andthat means every issue from the beginning—means easyaccess to the contents via search engines. Disadvantages?Monitors are not the best media. Computers and networkconnections can fail. Servers can be slow. But there is noway that

First Monday

could reach hundreds of thou-sands of readers in hundreds of places in any other way.

HC: What would be different if

First Monday

were aprint publication?

EV: Part of my fear is if we had a dedicated staff, if I wasdoing

First Monday

and nothing else and I had a groupof people working for me—say, a small staff of three orfour people that were working on

First Monday

—I’mafraid we might actually ruin the magazine. We might ac-tually do things to it that would either ruin its appear-ance or ruin the content. The very simplicity of

FirstMonday

makes it attractive. If we had a group of peoplewho were dedicated to working on

First Monday

, I thinkwe would make it much more complex, much more un-attractive than it is now. The viability of

First Monday

for our readers is its simplicity, its innocent roots. Every-thing we try to do as far as improvements is a matter oftrying to make it easier to use and more accessible. Myfear is that we would do more harm than good.

HC: Do you think that being electronic-only has af-fected

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 sub-scription to cover printing, shipping, and mailing costs.Because it’s not in print, those costs are not there. Cer-tainly there are other costs. There’s enormous cost for thetime of everyone involved, but they’re all giving that timeor their institutions are giving that time to make the jour-nal possible. Certainly, maintaining and running theserver is not free. Those costs are accommodated in someways to make this model work and to make this journalwork in a special way. A print version of

First Monday

. . .trying to imagine it . . . I’ve never been able to come up

with even a picture of it in my head, so it’s something I’venever really thought of too much.

HC: Are you concerned about the prestige of the journalat all?

EV:

First Monday

is cited very heavily. We have thou-sands of hyperlinks to it from other servers around theWeb. If you go into Google and look at the links to

FirstMonday

, we have an astonishing number. It’s ranked veryhighly by search engines like Google. Citations to

FirstMonday

appear in all sorts of places, even in prestigiousjournals like

Nature

,

Science

, and other journals. So, Ican’t say I’m not concerned about prestige. It doesn’tkeep me awake at night. If we publish good papers in

First Monday

, prestige will come. I think we already havea certain prestige in our niche.

HC: Going back to when you said you couldn’t imaginea print version of

First Monday

, I have another questionregarding electronic versus print formats. In 1994 youwrote an article in

Computers & Libraries

explaining thedifficulties in reading text on a computer screen.

3

EV: Oh, yes, absolutely.

HC: Have things changed since then with higher resolu-tions or are people simply getting used to it?

EV: There are still problems reading from a computerscreen because of flicker. The newer monitors, the flatscreen monitors, have certainly reduced some of thereadability issues that I brought up in that article. Printis still a much easier medium to read, especially when youhave a journal like

First Monday

that publishes reallylong articles—articles that don’t often have graphics andarticles that go on for awhile. I know that many peoplewho use

First Monday

on a regular basis print the articlesfor their own files and reference. So, what we’ve done isshift the burden of creating a print journal to our users.That means that they in a sense are picking up that print-ing cost. They are making that a local decision ratherthan the publisher making that decision.

I hope that monitor technologies continue to changein 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

isto look at ways of making the magazine more readable.We’ve been looking at experimenting with putting dropquotes into articles to break up blocks of texts. We’vebeen encouraging authors to put illustrations in theirpapers. We experiment with making the papers them-selves more readable on the screen, but I think mostpeople who read

First Monday

probably get about a pageinto it and then just decide to print it.

HC: I know I do. The only things I read on screen aree-books on my PDA (personal digital assistant), but on thelarge computer screen, I print out anything I want to read.

EV: Right. The basic issues that I brought up years agoare still there. There have been some slight improve-ments, but unfortunately not big improvements in mak-ing a computer screen work like paper.

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HC: How has your role as a librarian influenced yourrole as an editor and vice versa?

EV: That’s a good question. As an editor, being a librar-ian means that I have a bias toward papers that talkabout information policies. Also, I’ve always had an in-terest in copyright, how it influences libraries, and thesort of public organizations that provide information forthe public good. My library tendencies show up as an ed-itor. I’m dependent on other editors for the more technicalarticles or articles in other areas where I’m less familiar,like economics on the Internet, programming, anthropol-ogy, or how people are using the Internet. My biases def-initely come through. What I learn from

First Monday

islots about other areas of use of the Internet that Iwouldn’t normally know about. That makes me a betterlibrarian. It certainly makes me a much better instructorbecause what I bring to the classroom or what I bring tothe job is experience and familiarity with areas that Iwould never have known about. That is my personalcompensation for doing all the work on

First Monday

—learning about those other areas. We have contributorsto

First Monday

from at least thirty different countries.We have readers in 120 to 130 different countries. So I’vegotten to know lots of people through

First Monday

inthis virtual way. That’s made me both a better editor anda better librarian.

HC: Do you think you get more interaction, direct in-teraction, from your readers because you’re online?

EV: Yes, I think I do. For instance, Clifford Lynch toldme 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 thisremark consistently. That’s because we have such abroad readership. And, because it’s electronic, peopleare more comfortable writing to an author with a com-ment, either positive or negative, about what they’veread. For the authors, that feedback allows them tothink about brand new kinds of articles and research,and expand their ideas. As an editor, comments help methink about different directions for the journal and toexplore topics that I might not have thought about. It’sthe give and take of the electronic medium. The comfortof our readers to contact us and contribute their ideasis what really makes the magazine work, unlike otherkinds of magazines.

HC: You once wrote an article about the community ofthe Internet and laws regarding it.

EV: Yes, that was published in

First Monday

called “LexNetworkia.”

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HC: Right. That article was actually heavily distributedon a mailing list I was on at the time. Everybody was talk-ing about it when it came out in 1996. That mailing listis a very small social community like the one you de-scribe. It was a very good article.

EV: Thank you. It’s still being read even though it isvery old (on an Internet scale). That article, interestingly,

has been picked up in law journals recently becausepeople have been trying to understand legislation sur-rounding the Internet. Certainly, I present one view.Not everyone agrees with my view, but I present oneview of how legislation and law should treat the Inter-net and look at the Internet community. That was a funpaper to write. It was based on a talk that I did.

5

It wasfun doing the talk and writing the paper. Even thoughit’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 stilltrue.

HC: You teach a number of Internet-related courses atDominican University. What skills do you consider mostimportant for library and information science students toacquire for work with today’s electronic resources?

EV: The thing that I try to have most of the students dois not to be afraid; to make them not afraid of technol-ogy and to be willing to explore and willing to try some-thing. If it breaks, it breaks, and you try again. The stu-dents I’m most proud of in these classes are studentswho will admit to me that they’re very technophobic,that they’re afraid of computers, that they don’t likecomputers. In some of the classes that I teach they learnbasic Web design. They learn ten or fifteen commands inHTML, and they’re able to create some basic, simpleWeb pages. Watching those students gain control oftheir computer and their computer monitor and actuallycreate something is really wonderful. Some of the stu-dents have really blossomed from those courses. The bigpicture that I try to get them to learn is that these tech-nologies are something that they need to know about.What I tell them is that librarians will need to be infor-mation mechanics. They will need to be individuals whowill help others with computers and information. Theywill have to fine-tune how somebody’s doing a search.They’ll have to get into the innards of a search strategyand figure them out. So, they really are these mechanicsdoing that. But, they’re bringing a sense of the broaderissues that someone doing a search, working at the com-puter, with a program, or with a search engine may notunderstand. They bring special skills to that interactionwith the patron. They need to take advantage of newtechnologies. In my class, I can’t tell them about new tech-nologies because I don’t know what they’re going to be.What I want them to get from my classes is a level ofcomfort with technology and a level of confidence sothat they use that confidence with new technologies inways that I can’t even imagine. I see that happening. I seethe transformation, especially with students who areafraid of technology and afraid of computers. It’s veryflattering.

HC: Do you think that there are enough technology-related courses being taught right now? Or do you thinktechnology needs to be more or less of a focus?

EV: Well, I think there’s a combination. A need for boththe sort of practical technology practices—how to doXYZ with the Internet or XYZ with databases or a spe-cific program. That learning has a certain utility, but notbecause you’re going to learn how to do these things

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and use them twenty years from now. The programsyou’re learning now will not exist in twenty years, orthey’ll be totally transformed. By learning certain pro-grams and certain computer ways you’re building confi-dence with future computers and programs. That’s theimportant thing that you get out of these classes. Theother aspect that more classes need to think about andthat Kate Marek and I try to accomplish in our informa-tion policy class is to make students see the big picture—to think about the implications of changes in laws thatwill affect how libraries do their business and to makestudents aware that they have a voice so that they cando something as individuals about affecting policy. Weneed the sort of practical work with technology andpolicy issues to give students confidence in both areas:confidence in technology and confidence as a spokespersonfor information policy to affect change—to protectthose who won’t speak up, or can’t speak up, for them-selves, and to make sure that information continues to beavailable and accessible for as many people as possible.

HC: Related to information policy, as well as

to

FirstMonday

being electronic, who should have responsibil-ity for archiving e-journals?

EV: We have UIC, our current service provider, makemultiple backups of

First Monday

, of the server, and I,personally, make backups as well. So, there are levels ofbackups made at an institutional level. I think most elec-tronic publications are doing that. Archiving is reallyabout the amount of education the people with whomyou are working have. If you work with an Internet ser-vice provider or a person who doesn’t recognize thevalue of backups, then you shouldn’t be working withthat person or that organization. It would be hard tomake some big rule saying that the XYZ organizationshould be receiving all electronic backups. But, it maycome to that. It may come to the point where you havean organization, like the Library of Congress, that says,“Once a year

First Monday

and all e-journals shouldsend us a disk, a zip disk, or a CD-ROM, with all yourbackfiles on it.” It may come to that because, if e-journalsreally become much more common, we may need atsome point some national or international clearing-houses that will provide access to backups in case some-thing happens locally where a building is destroyed, andyou lose all your backups. That may happen eventually,but it hasn’t happened yet. Right now it’s a personal,local responsibility issue.

HC: Completely changing the topic. In late 2002 thelibrary of the Chicago Botanic Garden acquired overfour thousand rare books and journal titles. Is thatcorrect?

EV: It acquired 2,219 rare books and 2,000 journals. Al-together about fifty thousand pounds of material.

HC: Could you tell me a little bit about what was in-volved in that, and what is going on now?

EV: It’s a very interesting and neat collection becausethe collection provides a snapshot of botanical and hor-

ticultural history and scholarship for a period of fivehundred years from the oldest book in the collectionand one of the first botanical books ever published (in1483) to many books and journals published in thenineteenth century. The collection was originally ownedby the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Boston,which was founded in 1829 and had, at one point in thenineteenth century, the best botanical and horticulturallibrary in the world. Through a variety of circumstances,the Massachusetts Horticultural Society made a deci-sion to sell a portion of its library. The Chicago BotanicGarden was in the right place. Some of my staff was at-tending a meeting where they heard a rumor that thismight be happening. They brought the informationback to me. The Botanic Garden worked very quickly toproceed and see if this was true. It was true. We wereable to complete the negotiations last summer with thedeal completed in early fall 2002, and we moved the col-lection last fall. It took several semi trucks to move theentire collection.

We’re studying ways in which the collection needs tobe cataloged. So there’s lots of work that we’re doing onthat. For cataloging, our staff is using library school stu-dents, some from Dominican University, some from Uni-versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We’re lookingat a variety of plant resources to help finish the catalog-ing, and we are planning exhibits. Also, we’re planningwith a company from California called Octavo that doesdigitization of rare books to make some of the rarebooks available on CD-ROMs. They’ve worked withplaces like the Library of Congress and the FolgerShakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Octavo createsspin-offs of their high quality images by photographingthe books at ten thousand dots per inch, very detailedimaging. Other companies get those high quality imagesand then create other products like prints. So, we havea number of projects ahead—trying to get the collectioncataloged, trying to think about exhibits that we can usewith the collection, making the collection better knownso that scholars will work with the collection. We wantto familiarize ourselves with the collection. There arelots of interesting things in the collection that we’rediscovering—letters, illustrations, and graphics that arejust quite wonderful.

HC: So the collection came to you uncataloged?

EV: The journals were completely uncataloged. A por-tion of the books was cataloged, but they were not cat-aloged well. So, we’re going to have to recatalog them.The remaining portion of the books was not cataloged atall. So, we’re going to have to do a lot of work. Rarebook and journal cataloging is laborious and will takesome time.

HC: That’s all the questions I have for you. Thank youvery much for meeting with me.

Notes

1. Chicago Botanic Garden, http://www.chicago-botanic.org (5 Au-gust 2003).

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2. Andrew Odlyzko, “The Economics of Electronic Journals,”

FirstMonday

2, no. 8, August 1997, http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_8/odlyzko/index.html (5 August 2003).

3. Edward J. Valauskas, “Reading and Computers—Paper-Based orDigital Text: What’s Best?”

Computers in Libraries

14, no. 1 (January1994): 44–47.

4. Edward J. Valauskas, “Lex Networkia: Understanding the InternetCommunity,”

First Monday

1, no. 4, October 1996, http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4/valauskas/ (5 August 2003).

5. Edward J. Valauskas, “Access Denied? Effects of Censorship,Copyright and the Network Culture on Electronic Access to Informa-tion.” Paper presented at Library and Information Technology Associ-ation’s President Program, New York, NY, July 1996.

an interview with edward j. valauskas

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