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Michael Fernandez and Amauri Serrano, "Streaming Video Collection Development and Management" (Bloomsbury Libraries Unlimited, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Amari Serrano
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Michael Fernandez
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Amari Serrano
Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary underwritten by.
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Michael Fernandez
Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
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Michael Fernandez
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Amari Serrano
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Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast as you pro. There are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Michael Lamagna
Welcome to the New Books in Library Science Podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael Lamagna, and today I'm joined by the authors of Streaming Video Collection Development and management published in 2025 by Bloomsbury Now. Media collections are nothing new to libraries, but the growth in streaming collections and the demand for this content continues to increase across all types of libraries. With a range of acquisition models, a growing number of vendors offering streaming video, and an increase in user demand, it is essential for libraries to have a clear understanding of how to collect this content and integrate streaming video into the overall collection development strategy. Now, joining me today to discuss the book are the authors, Michael Fernandez, who's the head of technical services at Boston University, and Amari Serrano, who's the head of collection strategy at Yale University Library. Welcome to the podcast, Michael and Amari.
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Amari Serrano
Hi.
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Michael Fernandez
Thanks for having us.
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Michael Lamagna
Excellent. So before we dive into your book streaming video collection development and management, could you share a little bit about yourself, your background, and what led you into academic librarianship?
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Michael Fernandez
Sure. I can get us started here. So I got my MLS at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and had always had an interest in academia and working in that sector. Prior to my first academic job, I had jobs at nonprofits and at federal medical libraries. But academia just seemed like a good fit and a way to be kind of closer to the areas that really interested me and supporting teaching and research. So, yeah, this Mowry and I were colleagues at Yale. I'm now at Boston University. But it's, yeah, just been a really fruitful way for kind of me to continue my interests and pursue things and the licensing and acquisitions end of things for libraries.
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Amari Serrano
So mine is a little bit more complex. I'd never started sort of with the idea that I was going to become a librarian, and I don't want to go into specifics, but after I graduated from undergrad, I moved to Italy, got married, and realized I was working at the airport doing some customs work. And that is not what I wanted to do. My background was in history and Italian, and so I thought, what can I do? What skill set do I have? And really, I didn't have any marketable skills, but I did want to stay in Italy. So the idea was I can get a library job at an American library in Italy. That job never really came up. That said, you moved to the United States, and I got my mois at the University of Illinois. While I was there, I worked in the library. I got another degree in Italian literature, and then it was time to find a job. This was a way of working in a library, working in academia, kind of like Michael without having to get a PhD. It was the doing research without sort of a deliverable. And so that is something that I've always liked. I used to be a humanities librarian. I was a humanities collections librarian before coming to Yale. And I have to say that I do miss working with students and faculty. And actually streaming was the one way that I actually could work with faculty and students. So that was rewarding.
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Michael Lamagna
I think a lot of librarians probably relate to your path to an academic librarian career. So I can kind of get a sense. But what really sparked your interest in writing a book about streaming video collection development and management?
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Michael Fernandez
Yeah, so I can start off this really. This really came out of necessity more than anything. So Amaury and I started roughly around the same time. I think Amaury had started maybe six months before I did in 2018 at Yale University Library. And at that point, platforms like Kanopy were really coming to the fore in terms of streaming video in the academic space. And there was just an increasing demand from faculty, as well as an increasing expectation from students, researchers, other users that, you know, any video that they wanted to watch would just be available on demand. That is obviously not the case, as I'm sure we'll get into. But Yale was acquiring more and more streaming video, so that just was becoming more of our collection development policy, which Amaury can speak more to. But then, of course, 2020 is when the COVID pandemic began. And then, you know, all of the learning was moved to remote. So that just kind of quite sharply, you know, exacerbated that and moved everything over to streaming because we couldn't access our physical collections. So I think, you know, what we had found in working on this, that there wasn't necessarily, you know, any. Any written down rules for this. We were kind of figuring this out as we went along. So that's what kind of led to the book with Amaury and her job duties focusing on the collection development and budgeting end. Whereas I in E Resources, which was my role at Yale, was focusing on the kind of specifics of acquisitions and licensing and access and discoverability.
- [07:34]
Amari Serrano
The only thing I would add to that, Michael did a good job of covering it. It was very organic. I came into this job and was given a huge budget because I managed our central E resource budget, where we had all of our streaming. And our structure was such that we had the Film Study center join the library in 2017. But they were very much physical video. So we were getting requests and there was nobody that knew enough to fill them. But since the only streaming content was in my portfolio, I became the de facto streaming librarian. And so we had to come up. We didn't have any policies in place, we didn't have anything for video, and we just had to go with it. And we started to get more requests. And, you know, at Yale we have a healthy budget, but it is a limited budget. So when I got here in February 2018, we had already spent $80,000 on Canopy, and I had to shut that down because nobody Knew that we were doing PDA at the time, so we were just kind of doing things on the fly. So the book is a product of that sort of us working through that process, you know, drafting guidelines, providing some guidance to librarians figuring out how to budget for video. So it was really based on our experience here at Yale.
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Michael Lamagna
So we know that there's a range of acquisition models for streaming content. So can you walk us through the main models libraries need to navigate when they're building their streaming collections?
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Amari Serrano
So I think in the book I break them down into, into five models, sort of perpetual, short term, database use driven. And then the. There is no model, it's not available. And it's really. Most libraries will use many of these acquisition models and kind of match them to their needs and also their budget, if they have the means to do it. Also sort of what they're trying to do in their collection. So perpetual. This can be done at the collection level with the docuseek. You go out there, you buy a documentary collection, you buy it outright, you own it, you can host it locally, or you can pay them a hosting fee and they host on their platform. Some of these vendors will give you a digital file for archival purposes, others will not. The costs vary significantly by the number of films, the type of film, is it fiction, is it documentary? So you have the collections and then you have the one off films that you get. Canopy offers these. You know, they're often referred to as perpetual access licenses for those that are hosted on the, the provider's platform. You also do a lot of perpetual purchasing for single films. These are often, in my experience, based on request. You get a request from a faculty member, you get requests from a student, and it may be the only acquisition model out there. You may not, you know, it might be expensive, $500 a film, but that is the only option you have. And a lot of those for smaller distributors. Sometimes we actually have to go to the filmmaker, we have to host locally. And that's another thing we have to figure out. Michael can address that. So you have perpetual. You have your collections, you have your single title films. And then there are short term licenses and these, most people know these as sort of the one off Canopy licenses. So you have a mediated model. Somebody on the platform requests something and you go license that individual film. And that can range from, you know, a one year, three year, five year license, depending on sort of your needs. Also if the film has been requested multiple times, it may be cheaper in the future just to do a three year license. If the budget allows. And so there's a lot of that. And then there's a subscription model that kind of functions like any, like a database model, you can say like an ebook collection or a journal collection where you have a lot of content, they add content, they remove content. So there's some, you know, fluidity in what you're looking at. They can be fairly expensive. There can be multiple models on a single platform. So I've referenced Canopy twice. Canopy also has sort of a database subscription model there, sort of Canopy based. And then there are the larger ones like Alexander Street Press and Films on Demand. And there are different flavors to subscriptions depending on the vendor. So it's important to ask questions. And then there's a use driven model. And the thing with the book and with streaming is some of the things I've written in the book and examples I've written in the book have already changed because it's a very fluid landscape. So with use driven, there's patron driven acquisitions where a license is triggered once a film has been watched X number of times and for a certain length. And that was sort of the big problem several years ago with Canopy where people's budgets were, you know, where they were spending way too much. There was no control. Now, you know, Canopy has a smart PDA which is, you know, you pay a fee up front, you have more control, you have control over what's in that PDA collection, which before was like, let's open everything up. I know that here we were paying a lot of money for those great courses and there wasn't a way to blacklist them the whole, you know, fortunately we're past that. And then there's evidence based acquisitions which allows more control where you pay a fee up front, they open up a certain amount of content and then at the end of that period, so say they open it up, it starts July 1, at the end, in June, end of the fiscal year, they give you usage stats and you make your decisions in the amount of that deposit. And that is those are perpetual access license. So it's a way of building a collection. And then there's cost per circ. Sometimes pay per view. I have a problem with that. Growing up in the 80s and 90s to get that stream, you don't have that much pay per view now, but that's really found in public libraries where it's like almost like a dvd. You know, you use the film once, there's a cost to it. I know as a patron of a public library system in my town what they've done is you get only a certain number of circs and that's a way for them to control cost. And each circuit, you know, they charge the library X amount of dollars. You don't see that in academic libraries that I'm aware of all that much. But those are kind of the models. And it really depends on what you're trying to do. What's your objective? Here at Yale we want to build collections. And so that our preference is perpetual, but that depends on the budget. So the way things are now, we can get a 15% cut in the budget. And maybe perpetual isn't the way to go anymore, but we're just trying to serve an immediate need. And that's where short term licenses come in. Databases are another thing. And it's cost involved, but it's really what you're trying to do and what you can afford to do. And then there's no streaming option, which is a problem because our faculty sometimes expect us to be able to find a film. This happens a lot with feature films. Television series are horrible. They're even horrible to get on dvd. And so that's, you know, that's a thing. And in terms of no streaming option, it's also to what extent do we as librarians want to kind of push it to see as far as we can get? How much time do we want to spend trying to source a particular film? And so at a certain point you just like can't find it.
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Michael Lamagna
I will say I kind of chuckled a bit when you referenced the great courses in Canopy. We had the same issue at my institution where in a couple of weeks we were shocked at how much it was costing us. And I'm glad you keep referencing Canobie because that's one of those acquisition models. But how do these different acquisition models affect the way libraries should budget and the long term sustainability of these streaming collections?
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Amari Serrano
That is very difficult to do. I think one, the first thing is getting your priorities straight. What are you trying to do? What does your budget look like? What are the priorities in terms of budget? Are you there to, you know, is the budget there to support sort of stem and you're looking at read and publish yields. Where does streaming fit into this? For us, it's been sort of priorities. The main priorities meeting teaching and research needs. And so we've tried to purchase things outright when they're requested by a faculty member for a course. So that's been a priority. Now in the future, if we don't have the funds to do that, Then we start to do short term loans, short term licenses. So it's kind of like this sort of hierarchy. What I've done in terms of budget is I use the previous year as a starting point and I may increase it by 5%, just like I would for, you know, forecasting a database or an E journal package or something like that, and use that as a starting point. Do we have the funds to do this? Now the question is, if we don't, where can we cut what is sort of discretionary spending? And then looking at those databases that are expensive, looking at usage and seeing, looking also at course reserves data to see how much of that content in that database is actually used in a course and sort of doing that sort of thing to kind of get an idea where we can scale back. We've been fortunate in that we can show that there is a lot of usage with streaming. And so making sure that that's covered in the budget is a priority. You know, we spent millions of dollars on print as well. And if we get those circ stats back, they don't circulate all that much. And so it's a way also to go to library administration, say we have all of this usage, we really need to increase our budget. But I think getting priorities straight is important. And understanding sort of staffing in your capacity to do certain things, what's easier, what do you have the staffing to do? Perpetual access license is not that much of a deal. But if you have to start to locally host content, that can be problematic and can be very expensive because there's infrastructure involved as well. So there are a lot of factors that go in. Another thing might be your budget structure and how things work. Yale, it's not a good example to use Yale. I worked at Florida State before and I worked at Appalachian State, and each of them has sort of a different budget structure. But at Yale things are very decentralized. And so the way you approach acquisitions, you know, if it is in, you know, I don't know, a streaming audio music library has their own money. If it's, I don't know, some sort of, you know, art streaming collection, the art library has their funding. But if it's very expensive, what do you do? So there's a lot of sort of, sort of allocations at the beginning of the year, what you need, what you don't need. But there is, I wish I could say even in the book, this is how you do it. And the answer is there no, there is no one way. But I think having clear Priorities really helps at the very beginning. Understanding what's a reasonable cost to pay for some of these things is important. But like everything else that we purchase, what's reasonable? What, you know, a vendor, the quote a vendor gives us versus another library can be very different. That's the great thing about these one off licenses is a lot of times it's just on their website, the distributor's website, so you can kind of compare and see those databases. I don't know, we're probably paying more than other libraries.
- [19:40]
Michael Lamagna
Yeah, yeah. It's always difficult when, when it's all based on FTE and all on and the models and whatever they're using is all in the background, you never know.
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Amari Serrano
It's not FTE here at Yale because we only have 40 students, they're using something else. We paid less at Florida State and there were 40,000. So I don't know what their pricing model is.
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Michael Lamagna
So now when libraries are negotiating these streaming video licenses, what key considerations should they keep in mind? And are there particular clauses or terms that raise red flags?
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Michael Fernandez
Yeah, so Maori and I both work on licensing or did when I was at Yale. So I think we can kind of both speak to our experience on this. I'll just start by saying in terms of key considerations, I think the one that jumps out to me and there's in fact an entire chapter about it in the book is accessibility. So that's obviously very important for our user base that, you know, streaming film that we license will have things like closed captioning available, potentially transcripts or audio description, depending on where who it's going to be used by. So that's something that we definitely work with the distributors and providers for streaming video on. Usually the larger vendors will generally have this done down pat pretty well. We did, as Mowry has has noted as well, work with a lot of smaller independent filmmakers and distributors. So therein it can kind of be a bit of a challenge as they might not have a caption file readily available. But in terms of accessibility within the license itself, we do want to provide for us as the hosting institution to be able to do any remediation like create our own caption file if needed to support things like accessibility. In terms of a red flag, the one that I would say just jumps out is any license agreement that we come across that is overtly restrictive going beyond what is should be a fair use for education. And I think in this case both Amaury can put on our or raise our I am not a lawyer sign as neither of us are lawyers. Fortunately, at Yale, within our license team we do have someone with a JD who can help us with those questions as they came up. But effectively, yeah, you want to make sure that, you know, fair use isn't being impinged upon, that, you know, the streaming title that's being licensed can be used in a classroom setting, can be used for educational purposes. So that's one thing that we would keep an eye out on to make sure that that's not being restricted in the agreement before we signed off on anything.
- [22:41]
Amari Serrano
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- [23:09]
Michael Fernandez
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- [23:40]
Michael Lamagna
And so I have to ask this question because any library that offers streaming video, every librarian gets this question. Any faculty members probably thinking this question and it's how can I use this streaming content in my classroom, whether it's in person or online and then from outside the classroom and maybe student services, what are public performance rights and am I able to show these films to the general public or in an event? So I was wondering how do we think about usage in terms of in classroom as well as public performance rates?
- [24:14]
Amari Serrano
Well, in terms of face to face instruction that is covered under US Copyright law. Again, I'm not a lawyer and so that's not so much of an issue. The reason we license content and buy content is so that it's used in the classroom that it supports teaching and learning. The problem that I've seen, especially with streaming video is in some licenses they will limit or the sort of their definition of authorized users can be problematic. And so that we have to ensure when we're negotiating the license that we consider who is going to use the content on campus. You know, you have people that audit courses that are not necessarily Yale students. So to ensure how that works and Making sure that, you know, we have sort of walk inside in our license. Another thing that I've seen with streaming that's problematic when we're talking face to face and online instruction as well, is that they will limit, sort of, say, authorized users in the United States, and they will limit by location. And I understand that distribution rights vary from country to country. But the reality is we have faculty that are doing research abroad. We have students working on whatever, and they're Chinese or Italian, and they're working summer. So that is something that we need to discuss with the provider, with the vendor at the very beginning and tell them these are use situations. How can we provide access? Also, if you have somebody accessing our collection and they're getting authenticated through our systems, we have no idea that they are, you know, in. In Sri Lanka. So talking to the vendor and talking to them about what's reasonable, we will breach the license if this stays in. And that's another thing. We are customers and they want our money. So that's a negotiation point in terms of public performance rights. We try to negotiate public performance rights whenever possible. The problem is that it usually costs more depending on, I'm going to say docuseek again, their stuff comes with public performance rights. And that's sort of a perk, something, a reason why you would buy a film or another added bonus, we do note in the catalog, record those films that have public performance rights. So that is there in terms of, say, they don't see, you know, they go in and they. They see a film sort of in Swank's top 1000. We don't have public performance rights for that. But we do try to put on our website, we do have FAQs, we have a copyright guidance site where we specifically call out video. And the idea is that you're supposed to, as a student, as an instructor, as an Yale affiliate, contact a librarian. And usually those will come to the license review team. They'll come to me, and we'll kind of discuss that. We'll look at the license. But we try to be as transparent as possible. If we see something, we will let them know. You know, they'll post something on Facebook or something. You'll have like a. I don't know, a club on campus. If we see something, we will say something. We've had vendors also find things and contact us. And we've had to go and ask students to take things down.
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Michael Lamagna
So I'm glad you brought up that information that you add to catalog records about public performance rights. I Think that's very interesting and very helpful to the users. Now from your perspective, what are the most important access points for students and faculty to discover your streaming collections?
- [27:49]
Michael Fernandez
Yeah, that's a great segue into the kind of cataloging technical services work that we would do for discovery. So ideally you would want catalog records for all of your streaming video collections and the library catalog or discovery layer that's right there on just about every library's homepage in the search box would be your primary point of discovery. That said, that's the ideal. The reality of staffing and bandwidth is that it can be very challenging to continually manage these access points. Particularly at Yale where we were in a, I guess we'll call it a legacy ILS system. They just successfully migrated to alma, which I'm sure Mowry has fun stories to share on that. I, I left a little bit ahead of the Go Live date. Was that timing intentional? Who can say? But at any rate, at Yale we were not for items that were being put in reserve or where we had say just like a one year license where it wasn't a perpetually licensed title or we knew that the use was specifically for course reserves, which was what we were doing for a lot of the one off licenses that were limited term. We actually would not catalog those just because of the, you know, bandwidth for cataloging staff to manage that. So that's actually kind of discussed right in the metadata chapter under a section called to catalog or not to catalog. So we did find also in kind of our research looking at surveys of other libraries and what has been done at other institutions that, yeah, they're actually surprisingly not a necessarily majority like making everything discoverable. And I think kind of delving more into that, it was more use cases where they were limited term licenses, they had specific use for course reserves. So they were on the reserved system, those users could find it. Other use cases were, back before Canopy kind of refined their DDA models, just making everything discoverable was potentially, you know, taxing on the budget as like a lot of licenses could be triggered inadvertently by just putting that all out there into the world. So yeah, there's a lot of reasons why libraries may choose to be more selective with how items are made discoverable and how streaming content goes into their catalog and discovery systems.
- [30:37]
Michael Lamagna
So now with the high subscription cost and a lot of institutions now have limited budgets, how can libraries best assess usage and demonstrate the value of these streaming video collections? And Mary, you kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but how should we think about Discussing usage and communicating that to the administration.
- [30:59]
Amari Serrano
Michael will take the lead on this one and then I'll talk about budget.
- [31:04]
Michael Fernandez
Yeah, so this is an area where again working on the E Resources tech services side we kind of are in the weeds with actually pulling the reports and making them available. So yeah, there's kind of the handoff there where tech services and collection development work hand in hand where we're working on pulling things like counter data and usage data for streaming titles and collections and looking at the, you know, what different vendors can provide. I know that Canopy has actually a very elaborate admin dashboard for usage that has a lot of different data points to delve into. But I think that that's kind of like our end is gathering the raw data and then kind of again to what Amari's been talking to, talking about the, the different acquisition models like evidence based or demand driven kind of kind of call for different ways of assessing, you know, the overall value or return of investment on that package.
- [32:09]
Amari Serrano
In terms of my experience, usage does come into play and it's really those large databases because they are expensive year to year and when we're looking at streaming we're not looking at it in isolation. So the database costs are going up, but so are our ebook costs, so are our E journal costs. So what is the value of a particular collection? I found that getting usage stats and using that to negotiate and renegotiate subscription fee has been useful. I think, you know, a lot of libraries right now don't want to enter into multi year agreements simply because they're not sure what the funding is. And, and on our end we're probably doing the same thing. But I found also that for certain ones it we, we've done three year deals, we've seen that the usage is there. We could do get into a three year deal and keep the pricing flat. But having those usage stats really helps with the negotiation process. You know, it's difficult here to cancel things because people expect to have access to a lot of stuff and we've never really, we don't really cancel. And that's you know, possibly an advantage to having sort of a budget cut is it really allows us to look at what we're going to, you know, what we need to get rid of and also manage user expectations. So this is the one time where you can get rid of that database, cancel that subscription and somebody's not going to complain because you're going to say we got budget cut. So usage comes into play there. Also considering with some of these Vendors, sort of the totality of what you license with them and using that as leverage. So you're with ProQuest, Clarivate, ProQuest, Alexander, whatever the case may be right now that you sort of throw in streaming as just another resource that you license with them and having them talking to them about that, getting involved in working with consortia to negotiate pricing, to get favorable pricing. So there's a lot of that that involves. You kind of have to be flexible and creative.
- [34:23]
Michael Lamagna
Another question I have to ask is, how do commercial platforms like Netflix and Hulu fit into this discussion?
- [34:31]
Michael Fernandez
Well, they kind of do and they don't. I don't know. Amaury, do you want to field this one?
- [34:38]
Amari Serrano
Sort of. We can't get what Netflix has. They have a lot of exclusive content. Same thing with Hulu. There's a small subset of documentaries that you can show in the classroom, but the instructor has to have their own subscription. I think it coming to terms with the fact that we're not going to get that from a librarian's perspective, it's like, what's going to happen to that content? We don't have it in our collection. We can't provide access to our users. So there's that component. But some of it is managing expectations and talking to faculty and students and instructors. Don't put this on your syllabus because you're not going to be able to get access. The only way is having students get their own subscriptions to these commercial streaming services. You already have the cost of textbooks, then you're going to add a streaming service. I have a teenager at home. I'm pretty sure they can get access to the content without a subscription. But that is not where you want to go. But it's a fact, and I think it is worrisome for libraries at Yale, sort of the preservation of, you know, the scholarly record is important. What's going to happen with that stuff? Where is it going to live? I think Netflix has sort of removed stuff from their platform that was exclusive content. Where is that going to live? So. So that does worry me. You know, the only thing we could say is, you'll get your own subscription. It is what it is. And I don't know if Michael has anything to add to that.
- [36:06]
Michael Fernandez
Yeah, I would say the same. Yeah, we can't get it.
- [36:12]
Michael Lamagna
Well, I like the idea of managing expectations and having that conversation with faculty, because I know librarians get that question all the time. I saw this on Netflix. Whatever the commercial platform is, can we get it for my class?
- [36:26]
Amari Serrano
So that's even worse when they say, I saw it on Netflix in Germany. It's like, we're definitely not going to give it a kid.
- [36:35]
Michael Lamagna
So looking ahead, where do you see the future role of streaming video in an academic library collection?
- [36:43]
Amari Serrano
Well, I see us purchasing a lot less physical video. I see librarians having to grapple with, you want to build a collection. How do you build a streaming collection with DVDs? You bought them one off. You had really unique content. How do you build a collection of unique content with streaming video in a sustainable way? And I think that's a question we have here, because we have the Yale Film Archive is a collection that we build. And so that is our priority. But how do you really do that in practice? So that's one thing. And then, you know, what is streaming? Streaming at a certain institution could just be filling request. It's there for course reserves. It's not added to the collection. But the goal, the mission of that particular library and that particular institution is supporting teaching primarily. So that's where I see it. I see, you know, we deal with this. I see physical video to a certain extent, we're going to purchase a lot less streaming video, not less streaming video, a lot less physical video. We. We started sort of trying to have an approval plan for DVDs, foreign DVDs, and what we found with the area studies librarians is they would reach out to vendors abroad and they would say, you don't do DVDs anymore. We can give you the files. And so that started something else. We can't even get, like, DVDs from Africa or Southeast Asia. It's a lot more difficult to supply a dvd. To go ahead and ship a DVD now, there'd probably be a tariff on the dvd, who knows? But it's a lot easier for them to share a file. So where are we buying DVDs from anymore? Unless it's older content that isn't available. Streaming. That's the only thing I can see. But we are going to have to allocate a lot more resources to streaming than we did to physical video. That said, that's academic libraries.
- [38:38]
Michael Fernandez
Yeah. And I'll just spin off something that, from what Mallory had said about kind of what sort of existential question, what is a streaming collection? You know, what. What constitutes that? And, you know, yeah, with a film archive like Yale has with physical media, it's easy to build that because you buy it and you own it. There's just much of the streaming content that we were purchasing, apart from these individual files that we were self hosting and licensing for life of file were really just short term licenses. So there wasn't really an ownership model happening there. And I mean, I'll just kind of point to what's happening with the Clarivit announcement that came through with their ebooks models that, you know, they're not in the business of selling perpetual access to ebooks before they're just licensing subscription based collections. And you know, I see certainly with larger providers, that being the same case as well for the streaming format where libraries don't necessarily have, apart from maybe the largest, more well funded libraries, don't really have distinctive streaming collections. We all just license the same things on, you know, finite short term licenses.
- [39:57]
Amari Serrano
Yeah.
- [39:58]
Michael Lamagna
So one of the unique features in your book is the inclusion of those streaming vignettes. And I really enjoyed them. So what inspired you to include them in the book? How'd you choose who to feature and what are some of the common themes that emerged across those different vignettes?
- [40:15]
Michael Fernandez
So I'll take most of the credit or blame for putting in the streaming vignettes. I will say I did want to call them video vignettes, but I think Mowry vetoed that for just being too cutesy. But I'm an English major and I love alliteration. Anytime we can get it. But yeah, I think it was really important and this is something that both of us felt very strongly about, that it was really important that, you know, we speak to other libraries because, you know, the Yale experience is not going to be the same experience for workers at other libraries. So we really wanted to cover kind of a broader range in terms of that. And so we wanted to look at, you know, academics of varying sizes, large state institutions, but also smaller and medium sized private institutions, as well as talking to folks who are doing streaming at community colleges, at public libraries who are doing streaming on a consortial level. So that was really important for us to get kind of those different perspectives in place. And I think overall we saw that many of the same challenges existed. And I think Budget, which is which certainly Amourie can speak more to, was the one that came up again and again. But I mean, I will say that that might have been honestly one of my favorite aspects of. I don't know about Amaury, but one of my favorite aspects of putting the book together was actually getting to speak with our peers directly and find that even though we're at Yale and they're at a smaller sized liberal arts school, that we're facing a lot of the same problem. Problems and issues with streaming video, just, you know, with differences of scale, I.
- [42:04]
Amari Serrano
Would say that I learned a lot. It was a learning experience. You. Although budget is an issue, a common theme throughout these vignettes, the budget itself, the impact of streaming was different. You know, talking to someone at the public library and that person talking about the cost of utilities, they have one operational budget and how that's going to affect their materials budget as well. And so coming at it from different perspectives and also using that information to reread our chapters and ensure that we were covering those other libraries, we were, we were including different perspectives. And so I rewrote some of the budget part. You know, a, a, a sort of public library, the way their budget is sort of the funding source really can sort of shape how they spend their money. And I think that that's important. Just like at Yale, we have all of our collections. Budget is endowed. Some of it is very general, some of it is for mountaineering. So it really takes, you know, the choice to, to buy something. You know, there's a streaming mountaineering video collection out there. Not great, but we have this money that we have to spend. And so that really, you know, impacts selection and acquisition. But hearing that also from other institutions is important. Also, you know, talking about who makes decisions about what a library licenses was interesting because sometimes it's not the library, it's a group external to the library. And so, you know, talking about selection, talking about philosophy, some of that doesn't necessarily matter all that much because person making the decision or the unit making the decision is not in the library and the library has to advocate, has to request. So that was really interesting, I think.
- [43:53]
Michael Lamagna
Well, I have to say I want to thank you so much for sharing your insight on streaming video collections. And as we wrap up our time together, I'm wondering, now that the book is out, what are you working on next? Are you going to continue looking and examining streaming video, or are you going to bring your research in a new direction?
- [44:12]
Amari Serrano
I just came up for promotion. I don't want to write anything, I don't want to present anything. But what I'm doing right now is not necessarily research, but kind of. We have a new director at the Yale Film Archive and sort of onboarding him and talking about streaming. It's really allowing me to kind of think of what we're doing, how we're doing it. Maybe Michael is doing more. I know that there are areas that I need to develop sort of data sets, the acquisition and licensing of data. So I don't think I'm going to be doing a lot of research and writing. I'm going to be doing a lot of learning in the next year or so.
- [44:54]
Michael Fernandez
Yeah, I think kind of in terms of streaming, having just started here at Boston University about a year ago, the kind of speaking back to that note of scale, it's certainly very different than what's been what had been done at Yale. And it also, you know, gives me kind of an opportunity to actually apply things that, you know, or at least look into sort of different models that I became aware of in the writing of this book, in kind of those which we had just spoken about, those vignette interviews, which again, I'll echo Mallory and say they're really eye opening and, you know, just useful to see what that practice was to consider, you know, how we're applying that in our own work. So I think in terms of streaming, you know, I would be doing that, but. But not necessarily looking to write on the matter again in the near future. I'll say I will be, I guess at the time that the SAERS will be ahead of Charleston. I will be presenting at the Charleston Conference on Research Integrity with some colleagues on the vendor side. So I have that coming up. And if I can put in a plug of sorts. I'm the associate editor for Library Resources and Technical Services, which is published by ALA's Core Division, and that journal is fully open access, so available to all to read. So, yeah, I'll say give it a read.
- [46:32]
Michael Lamagna
I'll make sure to include a link in our show. Notes for everybody. So, Mari, Michael, I want to thank you so much for taking time today to speak to me about your book streaming video collection, development and management. I really enjoyed our conversation.
- [46:47]
Michael Fernandez
Wonderful. It was my pleasure.
- [46:48]
Amari Serrano
Thanks.
- [46:49]
Michael Lamagna
I'm your host, Michael Lamagna, and thank you for listening to New Books and Library Science on the New Books Network.
- [47:02]
Amari Serrano
Sam.