Marketing Culture in the Digital Age

From the Introduction:

Google’s investment of tens, some say hundreds, of millions of dollars in library digitization at Harvard University, Oxford University, the New York Public Library, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan, announced to the public in late 2004, took many in the library and cultural heritage sector by surprise—“a bomb was dropped,” one librarian told us.  Yet these sorts of relationships—publishing, distribution, and digitization projects featuring noncommercial institutions and commercial partners—actually have a long and rich ancestry, a history of effective precedents, featuring commercial involvement and investment in the distribution of scholarship and cultural heritage content in North America.

These noncommercial-commercial collaborations have varied widely in their scopes and approaches, and they have involved collections, companies, and institutions large and small.  The American Antiquarian Society, for example, the leading repository of pre-1800 printed Americana, has enjoyed a business partnership with ReadEx/NewsBank for over 50 years, also involving the investment, by a commercial company, of millions of dollars in production, distribution, and marketing.  The Library of Congress has been working with a variety of technology companies and commercial publishing companies like ProQuest (formerly UMI and Bell & Howell) since World War II.  Thomson-Gale, part of the Canadian media conglomerate Thomson, has been an active funder-partner of initiatives like the important Text Creation Partnership, in which ReadEx and ProQuest also have invested, and companies like ProQuest are collaborating with research libraries on the financing of new institutional repositories.  Chadwyck-Healey, prior to its acquisition by ProQuest, partnered with a number of libraries to build a product called the Periodicals Contents Index (PCI) that offered the table of contents of thousands of academic journals.  At campus-based technology and media laboratories such as the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon, the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California, and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, corporate supporters and partners have played an important, often foundational role.  Public history institutions like the Smithsonian Institution have engaged commercial partners in production and distribution as well.  Smithsonian Folkways signed a music deal with Microsoft in January 2005, for example, and then in February 2005 announced a major publishing partnership with NewsCorp’s book division HarperCollins.  These public-private relationships are and have been very much a part of making cultural and educational content at noncommercial institutions more accessible.

With the advent of the new Internet economy, where text, image, sound, and video products can be reproduced and distributed at little cost, the commercial sector is now devoting increasing attention and resources to cultural heritage resources and educational material.  There is a growing recognition that libraries and museums and archives are the equivalent of unexplored gas and oil fields when it comes to content that might be discovered, converted, repurposed, and marketed.  Furthermore, and quite apart from the content therein, commercial firms in publishing, music, film, television, gaming, software, and hardware are increasingly understanding that much of the most exciting media work in the world today is being sponsored under the aegis, or facilitated by the creative wisdom, of information or library science.  Indeed, the recognition is rising that library and information scientists occupy a vital place not only in the record-keeping of our society, which most people understand as historical in nature, but in the development of media, which is forward-looking.  Joining Google and Microsoft, companies such Apple, Electronic Arts, IBM, Pixar, Sony, Sun, Universal, and Yahoo—the list is long—have begun to invest in the human resources and know-how of the library and museum world.  Today, any company, any enterprise, and any venture fund with a screen to fill, an engine to search, a pipe to send bytes down, or a chip to sell is a current or potential stakeholder in the digitization and publication, broadly defined, of scholarship and culture and educational materials.

This rich history and these new media opportunities notwithstanding, much more needs to be done to understand and, depending on one’s perspective, secure the investment and the potential for investment from commercial companies across the sector.  Libraries, museums, historical societies, archives, and universities have not, as a rule, been particularly adept at marketing themselves—neither for their content, nor for their skills and expertise.  While it is true that the current corpus of collaborative relationships, taken together, has generated significant revenue for the sector to date, the legal and business structures and practices underlying many of these relationships have not always effectively facilitated the good work of cultural and educational institutions.  In many cases, the distribution of rewards from these arrangements, including revenue and publicity, has not been equitable.  Many leaders of nonprofit institutions, for a variety of reasons, seldom have developed backgrounds or experiences in the ways of business—in determining the market value of their assets, for example, or negotiating business arrangements, or conceptualizing and implementing business plans.  Commercial representatives have told us that this makes it a fundamentally different experience for them to engage in a business arrangement with a library than it is with a coequal commercial enterprise.  While there have been some efforts launched to familiarize cultural leaders with business tools and techniques, most of the business planning guides intended to improve planning in the cultural and educational sector have been prepared and distributed by authors based in the noncommercial sector, with little or no professional input from the business world.

The specific questions that have been raised about these business deals spotlight a general and longer-standing set of concerns about the wisdom of nonprofits entering into commercial relationships.  Criticisms of Google Print for Libraries mushroomed after the 2004 announcement, in part because of Google’s fame and size.  The very idea of universities that are centuries-old partnering with such a new and potentially powerful commercial organization aroused some strong reactions—regarding appropriateness, respect for rights, and almost anything, really.  Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association and writing in the ALA’s journal, addressed, with palpable hostility, “university administrators in the grip of cupidity.” “Google is supposed to have complex algorithms,” Gorman opined, on this issue, “but still produces piles of rubbish for almost all searches.  You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” A May 2005 open letter from Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, to Google’s general counsel referred to the “confusion,” mounting alarm” and “concern” among university presses about the competition presented by Google’s apparent “systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale”—“fundamental, broad-sweeping violation of the Copyright Act”—and it asked Google’s attorney to answer 16 pointed questions within 30 days.  It is not only scholarly publishers who have been balking at Google.  The Association of American Publishers, which represents the interests of both noncommercial and commercial institutions, sent a letter in June 2005 asking Google to suspend Google Print for Libraries for six months—“to facilitate discussion”—and in the spring of 2005, media and entertainment conglomerates including Viacom, Time Warner, and NBC Universal sent several stern warnings to the company about its activities and plans concerning the digitization and distribution of text, images, audio, and video.  Google has recently decided to interrupt, temporarily, the Google Print for Libraries operations to assess and respond to these concerns. 

For their part, representatives of the commercial sector—publishers, media companies, agents, investors—often are insufficiently prepared to search for opportunities effectively across noncommercial institutions.  As the reaction to Google Print demonstrates, they are often ill-apprised of the challenges that can confront collaborations and partnerships with mission-driven not-for-profits.  Perhaps they would benefit from an opportunity to learn more about collaborations with the sector, and to understand the powerful and diverse attachments to mission that the stewards of culture and education embody.  Perhaps noncommercial institutions could benefit from the involvement of business and finance professionals in their mission-driven work.

With all these things in train, it seemed that now would be an appropriate time to study, understand, and determine, in a more concerted effort, what can be done to both facilitate and improve these arrangements for the public good.  To that end, Intelligent Television, with generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Ithaka, embarked on a research project and report about these relationships to date.  This report reflects those investigations and the interviews conducted with approximately 30 university librarians, museum librarians, archive directors, foundation directors, university and nonprofit administrators, and others, all of whom are directly involved in building relationships between their own cultural and educational institutions and the commercial sector.  From December 2004 through July 2005, the project set out to ask these stakeholders the following questions:

This project also sought advice and commentary on current transactions and noncommercial-commercial relationships in the field from business leaders in the private sector —from publishers and distributors directly involved in these types of relationships, to lawyers, accountants, bankers, and investors who have engaged in work with these institutions or others like them.  The project asked representatives of these enterprises what business outcomes and strategies, for example, they have admired in the noncommercial world, and what visions and practical recommendations they might have for improving the results and efficiency of these relationships in the future, and what programs and services could facilitate better dialogue on both sides.

This report discusses the responses to these questions.  Throughout, we have sought to understand what each side contributes to transactions of this nature; what the deal structures are; and what the economic and other reactions have been in the market.  We have also sought to understand where noncommercial organizations see their primary missions and roles today, and where they see themselves getting to in, say, five years hence (a question almost impossible to answer, we know).  The report places our investigation in the broader, evolutionary context of the market for cultural and educational content in the digital age.  It groups the relationships we have uncovered according to a taxonomy or sorting structure for types of deals (categories that are still under development).  It relates comments from outside the field provided by commercial experts whom we have interviewed, and it shares the recommendations and requests for further study and activity that emerged from our interviews.

Click here to download the full report in PDF form