Helping to Justify Academic Library Budgets Since 2004
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Full Utilization of ©-Law Sections 107, 108 and 109 Can Justify More Than 10% in Budget Increases
KIC Saved $88 Million in Academic Funds in 2019 and can save $300 million each year for decades
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In 2019, academic libraries saved $88 million* with KIC self-serve book digitization kiosks. With KIC’s exceptional new resource utilization reports, these libraries could have been reimbursed for the bulk of those savings.
With COVID officially over, KIC usage rates are steadily returning to pre-COVID levels, and DLSG now has compelling KIC usage reports that can help get substantially more budget funds,both for general use and for more high value digital age services, such as next generation discovery technologies.
KIC is compatible with HotLinks revolutionary 2D full-text SearchMATCH discovery system. Your students, professors and researchers can use KIC to input many digital and printed pages of research into HotLinks, and instantly discover the most relevant journal articles from billions of pages,including 5 million open access journal articles as well as your digital subscriptions content.
This graph of over half of KIC systems in the US assumes a value per page scanned of $2 - about the same as the price per page the big journal publishers charge for subscription content downloaded, and that your university is agreeing to pay for each year.
* based on a value of $2 per page, which is at the low end of what many large publishers target per journal article page.
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Two Ways Digital Content is Received
by Our Patrons (2018-2019)

Costs: All KICs / Subscriptions

Benefits: All KICs / Subscriptions

Potential Benefits: ©-Law Section 107 & 108 (f)

Potential Benefits: Advanced Technologies

Digital Subscriptions
Free Copies
$10M $5M $0M

KIC Fleet Usage Report

Content Received by
Section 107 & 108(f)

Content Received by
Digital Subscriptions

THE PRODUCTS
Self-Service Scanning ©-Law Exception 108(f)
KIC Self-Serve Digitization - the most cost-effective way for patrons to get copyrighted content
KIC is in over 1000 academic libraries and hundreds of public libraries today largely because it's a wonderfully cost-effective way for patrons to get copyrighted content from libraries in digital form, in stark of contrast with high-cost publisher subscription fees. DLSG suggests that academic libraries target 10% as the portion of digital content that patrons receive via self-serve scanning.
While subscription content is downloaded before the user can determine its relevance, library KIC users can read the content first to be certain that it is what they want, then digitize it in a few minutes. KIC can digitize a journal article or 30-page book excerpt in only one to two minutes, far less than the time it takes to check out a book, then return to the library to check it back in. In addition, patrons can take the PDF files of their digitized content off campus, and keep it forever.
Copyright Law: The only legal limitations to using KIC are
1. The content must be in print form and must be scanned by the user; and
2. The user must be informed that digitizing copyrighted content must comply with copyright law section 107 and 108(f)
Target 10%
As long as libraries underutilize ©-Law Section 108, scholarly publishing remains a monopoly. Thus, it’s compelling to set at least 10% as a target percentage of all scholarly content received by patrons to be from self-serve digitization kiosks.

The best ways to achieve 10%

… and justify substantial budget increases are:

1

Get students to perform more ©-Law Section 108(f) digitization by increasing awareness of the Section 108(f) digitization stations:

  • a. Place one or more info kiosks near library entrances and where students gather perhaps even outside the library, and configure those kiosks to inform students, faculty and researchers about your KIC self-serve digitization kiosks that are conveniently located near or amongst your print collections.

  • b. Promote KIC's free MyDocs app to students - MyDocs includes KIC Study System and HotLinks Study Tool with its Personal Digital Mind Palace, which instantly connects students to your Concentrated Collections Areas (CCAs), providing substantially more exposure to your library’s copyrighted content. Hotlinks provides a button for students to use when they are shown only summary information about some copyrighted content that is available in print (for checkout or for copying), but is not part of a digital subscription. The next time the student is in the library, he/she can digitize the content in a few minutes and instantly and flawlessly integrate the content into his/her HotLinks and Personal Digital Mind Palace. This also gets more students into your library, which can further justify budget increases.

    Imagine many of your students importing course materials or a textbook chapter into MyDocs, performing a HotLinks 2D Full-text SearchMATCH, digitally discovering a chapter of a printed book on your library shelves, a chapter that is highly relevant, but unviewable due to copyright restrictions. Then imagine the student pressing a button to add the item to their digitize TODO list, digitizing the item, then going back to HotLinks and being able to view the item anywhere in the world, forever, legally, even without an internet connection. The value of your print collections will rise instantly. More information on HotLinks can be found below on this Web page.

  • c. Promote KIC's free MyDocs app for researchers - MyDocs includes HotLinks Research Tool with Personal Digital Mind Palace, which instantly connects researchers to your Concentrated Collections Areas (CCAs), providing substantially more exposure to your library’s copyrighted content. Hotlinks provides a button for researchers to use when HotLinks shows only summary information about some copyrighted content that is available in print (for checkout or for copying), and is not part of your institution’s digital subscription. The researcher can press an [ ILL ] request button and instantly request the content to be digitized by library staff, whether the content is a journal article or a few chapters in a monograph. Upon receipt by the researcher, the content is instantly and flawlessly integrated into his/her HotLinks and Personal Digital Mind Palace. This also gets more researchers to visit your library, which can further justify budget increases. More information on HotLinks can be found below on this Web page.

2

Place a six to eight station HotLinks with Mind Palace Collaboration System in a reservable collaboration room for collaborative study and research and other content. Each station is a 65 inch floor-standing touch screen. The user’s content appears larger than life on the leftmost touch screen. The screen to its right contains lists of highlights in the user’s content and in items found using HotLinks 2D Full-text SearchMATCH Discovery. Each highlight is linked to the source, and touching a highlight will result in the content being displayed instantly on one of the remaining 65 inch floor-standing stations. Hundreds of items of interest can be accessed instantly with a touch. Highlights can be shared among HotLinks users and can be printed along with citation information.

3

Implement a Concentrated Collections Area (CCA) with a high-speed KIC for quick and convenient access to and digitization of excerpts from several thousand of the most frequently accessed books and monographs and hundreds of thousands of frequently accessed journal articles. 1,000 frequently accessed books can be ‘catalogued’ into HotLinks per month by one worker. One worker can also ‘catalogue’ tens of thousands of journal articles into HotLinks per month. More…

Concentrated Collections Areas (CCAs)

Naturally, libraries can't expect to replace much of the content that their patrons are currently getting from publisher subscriptions, but libraries already own vast amounts of copyrighted content in print form, and much of that is not available via subscriptions.

Improving the discovery process...

Until recently, printed content discovery was far inferior to digital content discovery. DLSG solves this problem with cost-effective Concentrated Collections Areas and our revolutionary 2D full-text SearchMATCH discovery and Personal Digital Mind Palace technologies and collaboration system. More...

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Note that DLSG can setup a collaborative digitization project for your statewide university system. The resulting system will SearchMATCH all content ingested by all collaborating libraries, but DLSG's digital fences will only allow content to be viewed if the user is in the same place as the content, in compliance with ©-Law § 109(c).

If the user is not in the same place as the item, summary information about the item is displayed along with an [ ILL REQUEST ] button, which allows the user to instantly make a request for the book chapter or journal article from the institution that has the item.

scan section

Concentrated Collections Area (CCA)

Getting the Funding

KIC Fleet Manager's new reporting system can provide help getting budget money for systems that you don't already own. Here are example KIC Fleet reports from 2019, prior to COVID.

KIC Fleet Report Examples
InterLibrary Loan ©-Law Exception 108(d)
BSCAN ILL digitization - the most cost-effective way for libraries to provide copyrighted content
BSCAN ILL is use by most of the 260+ R1 and R2 institutions, largely because it is the most cost-effective way for libraries to deliver digital copies of journal article content to their researchers, in stark contrast with publisher subscription fees.
Libraries can digitize the same journal article hundreds of times, taking only a minute or two each time, and each time, sending that article to a different requestor. In addition, patrons can take PDF files of ILL-requested digitized content off campus and keep it forever.
While downloaded subscriptions content can often be irrelevant to the user, if patrons are able to use 2D full-text SearchMATCH discovery, the possibility that the article is irrelevant is very low. Then in only one to two minutes, a 30-page excerpt can be digitized.
In light of the great value ILL represents for research libraries, DLSG suggests that they TARGET10% as the portion of digital content that their patrons receive via ILL. To increase ILL use, four of the five self-serve digitization target suggestions for KIC (excluding suggestion 2) will promote greater ILL use if the library includes a significant number of print journals in their CCA ingestion process.
BSCAN ILL Scanner Component Options
Preservation, Archives & Digital Fence
High Performance Digital Preservation / Archival Systems Opus Workflow & Opus FreeFlow for controlled project management including digitization, image treatment and metadata capture
The Opus digitization process was designed specifically for academic libraries, museums and archives. Use opus workflow to build digital assets for preservation, archive, digital collections for the Web, and for viewing software. Its image treatment processes such as fan, gutter and book curvature removal, and content location and registration, are dramatically faster and easier to use than photo editing software.
Opus operates a wide array of preservation quality scanners and allows for the import of existing images as well. It then groups images into objects (i.e. books), which are easily managed and processed. Finally, it renders those objects into a variety of derivatives.
One product...
8 Exceptional Advancements
Opus has a range of options and prices. Opus WorkFlow is for larger digitization projects. It supports multiple stations and multiple simultaneous workers. Some Opus WorkFlow features are available in Opus FreeFlow as options. Ask your DLSG representative for more information.
Opus FreeFlow Lite is a solid and easy-to-use entry-level product, while Opus FreeFlow includes the most popular features, yet remains easy to use is. Use Opus FreeFlow for smaller projects and ad hoc scanning.
  • Superior Image Treatment... Designed for Projects and Archival
  • Fully Integrated Hierarchical Metadata Capture
  • Next Generation Workflow with Automatic Archive
  • Open RAID Digital Archiving & Migration Management Software using Automated Data Migration Facility
  • Customizable output formats including Web with virtual 3D page tuning
  • Enlightened Architecture
  • Supported by experienced digital experts
  • Creation of large amounts of derivatives unattended (e.g. overnight)
Digital Fence ©-Law Limitation 109(c)
Copyright Law Section 109(c) allows copyrighted content to be viewed indirectly(e.g., by projection), provided an owned copy of content is in the same place. This supports a legal form of controlled digital lending, albeit with a substantial restriction – that the reader must be in the same ‘place’ as a purchased copy of the content.
To allow public libraries and academic institutions to take advantage of ©-LawSection 109(c), DLSG offers two types of Digital Fence: 1)IP based; and 2)WiFi Signal Strength with Triangulation. This is because copyright law does not specify the ‘place’ in detail.
It seems that the authors of copyright law section 109 (c) were purposely ambiguous when they specified that a single image of a particular piece of content can be viewed provided the paid-for source content is in the same ‘place’ as the image is viewed. Perhaps they did not feel confident to predict all the circumstances that might apply to this exception to copyright law.
While our opinion is not legal, it makes sense to DLSG that in the case of universities, the ‘place’ the law is referring to is the entire campus, because the purpose of the university library is to hold the books that the university purchases.
If the institution opts for the WiFi-based digital fence,a DLSG technician assists the library in setting up the initial WiFi-based digital fence while training library staff to tune and adjust it as needed (e.g., if library WiFi signals change).
2D Full-Text SearchMATCH Discovery
For Students
For Researchers
Discovery Technologies Comparison
Full-Text Search vs Artificial Intelligence(e.g.ChatGPT) vs HotLinks 2D SearchMATCH
Discovery Technologies Comparison Chart Full-Text Search Artificial Intelligence HotLinks 2D SearchMATCH
Support for simple key term search/discovery YES YES YES
Input of 100+ pages (beyond simple key terms) NO YES YES
Correlation 100+ pages of input with billions of pages of scholarly research NO YES YES
Instant access to subscription-based content (when on-campus) NO* N/A YES
Deterministic algorithms that do not obscure findings from researchers and instead, allow researchers to draw their own conclusions YES NO YES
Publisher-power agnostic (does not increase dependency on publishers) NO Unknown YES
Integrated with Personal Digital Mind Palace NO NO YES
* some full-text search systems provide a programmatic interface (an API) for accessing the content

For many decades, physical card catalogs were an essential part of the library. Scholarly discovery advanced tremendously with digital card catalogs and journal article abstract search systems such as WorldCat. It’s not surprising that many researchers and librarians thought that it couldn’t get better than that. Then in 2004, scholarly discovery made another tremendous advancement with full-text search of scholarly content, and again, many thought it couldn’t get better.

Yet full-text search has a fundamental limitation – it takes only a few key terms as input. Researchers typically create and acquire hundreds, even thousands of pages of content relevant to their research over months and years. In addition, college students are assigned hundreds of pages of relevant study materials at the beginning of each semester. The next generation discovery system must be able to accept hundreds of pages of content as ‘search’ input.

In the past year, two tremendous new discovery technologies became available, ChatGPT and HotLinks Research Tool, and both of these technologies can take many pages of content as input. HotLinks was built for scholarly research and study and can take hundreds of pages of research or study materials as input, and ChatGPT can also take many pages as input. From that point forward, these two systems differ greatly. ChatGPT can create multiple pages of text output and can even create images. HotLinks exists to serve researchers and college students and as such, does not draw conclusions, leaving that to its users.

The following three diagrams compare Full-text search, ChatGPT and HotLinks.

StudentResearcher
Receives Answer
StudentResearcher
Derives his/her
Own Conclusions
from Hot Links

Inside HotLinks 2D Full-text SearchMATCH Discovery System

HotLinks extracts thousands of key terms from the input material, including textbook chapters, course materials,research papers, journal articles, monograph excerpts, etc., and performs a search on each of the thousands of key terms. The thousands of results for each of the thousands of search terms are then fed into the HotLinks matching system, which finds the best matches with the input material and sorts those matches by relevance to the source materials. The diagram below illustrates the process.

Note: HotLinks comes preloaded with five million Open Access journal articles and 16,000 Open Access monographs and books, and is ready to connect with your institution’s subscription-based content servers.

Hundreds of Key Terms from Study Materials (e.g. one or two chapters)
Hundreds of Search Results
100+ Most Highly Correlated / Relevent Items in Priority Order
Thousands of Key Terms from Research Materials (e.g. journals)
Thousands of Search Results
200+ Most Highly Correlated / Relevent Items in Priority Order

DLSG’s Personal Digital Mind Palace allows studentresearcher to highlight relevant content in hundreds of HotLinks SearchMATCH results. In the same and future sessions, navigating between all of the relevant content found in HotLinked journal articles and monograph/book chapters is instant –simply selecting a highlight instantly displays the highlight in the context of the journal article or monograph/book chapter containing it.

In addition, at any time, a studentresearcher can output the highlighted content with citations to the source documents, eliminating the tedium from that process.

How to Evaluate and Fund the Acquisition of
HotLinks 2D Full-text SearchMATCH Discovery

If US R1 and R2 Institutions really wanted to, they could reverse the monetization of research sharing and overpriced journals at any time, simply by working together to change the publishing policies of their researchers, and Europe and the rest of the world would gladly join in. Instead, US university leaders have been letting their library budgets slide over the past 35 to 40 years from 3.5% to 1.5% of overall university budgets (on average), and redirecting that 2% to faculty salaries, research budgets, sports teams, etc., leaving their libraries to pay for journal subscriptions. The only explanation for this fairly consistent trend across the US is that university leaders believe they get more return when they invest outside their libraries.

If academic libraries received 3.5% of their university budgets at one time, it can happen again, but only if the libraries return adequate values for the increased investments. The road back to 3.5% must be paved by technology. For over fifty years, the best returns on investments have nearly always been with technological advancements. Only scientific advancements have better returns. The best possible investments R1 and R2 universities can make are in technologies that support and enhance scientific research.

While libraries are responsible for providing discovery for and access to published research, they usually need the review and approval of their institution’s top scientists before investing in any particular technologies. In order for an academic library to attract any of its university’s top researchers, it must have a well-organized presentation of any new advanced discovery systems and tools that it is considering. DLSG understands this and is offering to sponsor two presentations of its revolutionary new HotLinks 2D Full-text SearchMATCH Discovery system. The first presentation is for students. It also serves as a preliminary presentation during which library leaders can determine which of its university’s researchers are appropriate to invite to the presentation for researchers.

Presentation I – Study Tools

  • MyDocs – the Free KIC App for managing course materials and library collections content captured using KIC
  • KIC Study System – including ReadAlong Audio, computer-assisted speed reading (SKIM), instant flash cards, and computer-assisted reading for visually impaired
  • HotLinks Study Tool – a specialized discovery system that instantly provides many alternate treatments of the topic a student is currently studying, SearchMATCHed from 16,000 open access books and monographs (and optionally, five million open access journal articles)
  • Personal Digital Mind Palace – which retains links between all of a student’s study materials and relevant content found within the 16,000 open access books and monographs (and optionally, five million open access journal articles)

Presentation II – Research Tools

  • HotLinks Research Tool – a specialized discovery system that takes hundreds of pages of a researcher’s own content as input and performs a comprehensive 2D full-text SearchMATCH discovery on five million preloaded journal articles (open access). Note that HotLinks is compatible with journal publisher content servers and can perform SearchMATCH on any content that is accessible for university-created search algorithms
  • Personal Digital Mind Palace – which retains links between all of a researcher’s personal research and relevant journal articles found within the five million open access journal articles and journal publisher servers that your institution has access to and that are integrated with HotLinks

If you would like to host one or both of these presentations, please contact a DLSG customer support representative at 561-886-2977 or CustomerSupport@ImageAccess.com.