The Graveyard of the Database

Because it had started to rain and I was on campus anyway, I stopped in at the University of Central Missouri library with the idea of catching up on a few small-press reviews of poetry books. I took the shining glass elevator to the mostly empty periodicals floor, passing a couple banks of computers on the way, and walked to the shelf where the current issue of Virginia Quarterly Review usually sits. It wasn’t there. Neither could I find The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, or Sewanee Review. Figuring they were all being re-catalogued, I asked the reference librarian how I could find them. “Oh, those?” he said. “They’ve all been canceled. Hardly anyone ever reads them, and, anyway, they’re all available in a database.” When I protested — I admit I became a little bit spluttery— he merely reasserted his original premise: People don’t read them. People like databases. Databases are where it’s at.

And as I looked further, I found that it wasn’t just those four magazines. The library had relegated Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many others to the databanks. To save money and space, no paper copies will be available for readers ever again.

If this were merely an eccentricity of my little arm of the permanently cash-strapped Missouri higher education system, I’d have registered my complaints and walked away. My guess, however, is that little of this kind happens at my library that isn’t already a trend elsewhere. And, beyond my own admittedly sentimental attachment to the printed page, there are a number of reasons why this is a bad thing.

Unlike, say, The Journal Of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics, magazines like The Kenyon Review are edited not to convey the results of scientific studies or new discoveries for a limited audience of scholars and scientists. Rather, their aim is to bring a unified and interesting reading experience to a general audience. Moreover, according to Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways, “Our Summer 2005 issue, for example, included nonfiction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and fiction by Isabel Allende, but their shared agent (Carmen Balcells) denied electronic rights, so if libraries dump the paper copies of that issue, those parts of the issue will cease to exist. And the comics by Art Spiegelman don't translate well—and certainly the inserts and fold-outs we've run can't really be digitized at all. And that really bothers me.” Or, according to Kevin Morrissey, Managing Editor at VQR: "Journals are in a no-win situation when it comes to signing up with the database companies: if we don't, we're resisting new technologies and not adapting to readers' new expectations of content delivery; if we do sign up, we marginalize our print edition."

From the point of view of the book reviewer, this situation is possibly graver. The titles mentioned in this blog are among a select group of magazines that regularly feature reviews of small-press books, the kinds of books that are almost always overlooked by newspapers and glossy magazines. As such, they have consistently been a source of news to people who care about such things, offering information about who has published what new (otherwise unadvertised) poetry book, providing critical assessments of various small-press authors’ latest innovations and developments. To offer these only on databases may be wonderful for researchers fifty years from now, but probably at the expense of the contemporary readership for whom they are intended. (Or, as my colleague Jim Obertino put it, “I do miss the paper copy of Victorian Studies, which I regularly consulted, but now rarely if ever will because it is only available online.”)

Meg Galipault, the Managing Editor at the excellent Kenyon Review, observed that, so far, databases haven’t had a big effect on sales of the magazine and, she said, either way, “we still get paid … I suspect, though, that eventually libraries will do away with periodicals completely and only offer access through the online services they subscribe to.” I’m willing to admit that, for librarians, there are many good reasons to adopt databases. They make storage easy, they hold an unimaginable amount of information, and they cost less than subscriptions (though, for the most part, litmag subscriptions go for about $20-$30 per year, one-fiftieth the cost of a new computer). But when I ask myself whether I’d continue to write for these magazines if I thought my reviews were destined immediately for the graveyard of the database, I have to say my answer would be no. And that, I’m afraid, is where we may be headed, at least at our libraries.

--Kevin Prufer, NBCC board member