In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Beyond Google:What Next for Publishing?
  • Kate Wittenberg (bio)

This essay first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on 16 June 2006.

While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars on every possible aspect of scholarly communication, information technology, digital libraries, and e-publishing, students have been quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information. Their behaviour, undertaken without consultation or attendance at formal academic events, urgently forces those of us in scholarly publishing to confront some fundamental questions about our organizations, jobs, and assumptions about our work.

Most students today arrive at college assuming that a Google search is the first choice for doing research, that MySpace is the model for creating online content and building peer communities, and – perhaps most important – that multitasking with various electronic devices, often from remote locations, is the traditional way to do class work. The implications of those changes must transform our publishing strategies.

If 'digital natives' are the next audience for our scholarly resources, shouldn't we be thinking about new ways to organize, store, and deliver our content? In fact, is content even what we should be focusing on for this next generation of users, or are the tools, functionality, and access built on top of the content what are of real value?

As publishers, we are going to have to adapt quickly and creatively if we wish to remain true to our missions as information professionals and yet be relevant to users. Are we ready? [End Page 31]

Until now we have not only controlled the development of content but also its discovery and delivery. We can call copyright foul when the books or articles or teaching tools we publish are used in ways we haven't anticipated, and continue business as usual. We can keep our scholarly credentials pure by avoiding any venture that hints of cooperating with a commercial enterprise. We can frown on much of what students do with technology as 'entertainment.' Or we can think creatively about what comes next for publishing.

Until now we have spent most of our energies in rear-guard actions: fighting Google over copyright infringement in its plans to digitize library books, for example. It's time to think 'beyond Google.'

Going forward, our work must take a more experimental turn. We need to get serious about developing online publications that allow students to freely explore the vast array of content and tools available through the World Wide Web, while still allowing an appropriate level of guidance concerning how to select and evaluate the sources that they find. And we must look at methods to deliver and store content in ways that allow students to use their remote devices to access it and that work through and enhance the online communities where they spend so much of their time.

To develop those, we need to initiate conversations with new players and new partners.

In essence, the old model of working in a publishing industry that operates independently from other sectors of the information community is no longer effective. The concept of competing with those other industries and players for dominance in the user market has become not only pointless but also destructive, to our own organizations and to the information environment as a whole.

Soon online gaming companies, commercial search engines, manufacturers of electronic devices, and high school students will become our advisers and collaborators. To understand the world in which students live and work, our market research will include arranging focus groups with teenagers, purchasing (and playing) video games, and observing college, high school, and middle school students socializing, studying, and relaxing.

One strategy we could pursue involves meeting users on their own turf. Since we know that students are spending more and more time in social-networking environments like MySpace and Facebook, [End Page 32] building complex communities and sharing musings and opinions on everything from new bands to favourite books, let's form a partnership with one of those companies to build a networking space focusing on the information needs of students. Such a site could enable dialogue and collaboration among its users, discussion of readings, and creation of multimedia class projects. Faculty members and...

pdf

Share