So, a few notes:

1. Smaller pizza stone:  Earlier, I recommended a larger (16") pizza stone like the American Metalcraft PS1575, despite warnings by none other than the guru of the ceramic cooker, the Naked Whiz, that the larger stone may result in scorching your gasket.  Indeed, my gasket is long gone and not really missed, even for low-and-slow cooking.  Nevertheless, after breaking my fire brick stone in an adventure I'll explain later, I went for the 14" stone from BGE, which I believe contributed to my being able to get a higher temperature more easily.
2. Raise your grid; skip the plate setter:  You need to get your pizza stone up to the level of the opening of your BGE.  Most of my early efforts were done with the BGE plate setter.  I recently switched to using a raised grid, without the plate setter, and this had two very beneficial results.  First, there was a clearer path to the dome, and with the heat's upward path impeded, you seem to get a hotter temp more quickly.  Second, with little or nothing between your stone and the first, the stone seems to get hotter.  Without an IR thermometer, I couldn't swear to it, but the difference in the crust was obvious from the first time I did it.
3. Give your dough some time:  I've refined my dough recipe and wrote about that earlier.  The proportions have turned out to be dead-on, but one thing I've added to that process after having read it in a number of places is letting the dough proof for 14 hours or more.  Yeah, I know, sounds like a complicator, but it's actually a simplifier.  Get everything set up to divide the dough (the first 30 minutes of so worth of work), split it into two plastic containers and pop them into the fridge overnight.  When you're a couple of hours away from cooking, take them out and transfer them to covered bowls.  They'll get to room temperature and rise a bit more, and will also have even more elasticity.

Here are a couple of pizzas that illustrate what I'm writing about here.  The first (at the top of this post) is a standard pizza margherita.  Note the slight bit of char on the crust, which was very tasty.  The dough sprang up and got that wonderful loft within a minute or two of going onto the stone.  The total cooking time was four and a half minutes, and though it could have possibly gone a shorter amount of time, everyone agreed that it was soft, neither dry nor underdone, and tasted wonderful.   The second, here, was a mixture of some locally cured red pepper bacon (Tracklements) with buffalo mozzarella, topped with some fresh local arugala.  You can also see, here in the cut-away, the nice job the crust did, also in 4.5 minutes.  The temperature inside the dome of the BGE was about 600 degrees.

I mentioned earlier breaking my fire brick pizza stone.  I thought I might experiment with trying to simulate the wood-burning oven by keeping the top on and propping open the lid of the BGE with fire-proof ceramic wedges.  This was a disaster.  The pizza blackened on the bottom, the heat seemed out of control and irregular, and even the pizza stone--even though it was fire brick--cracked down the middle.

• 400 g of flour.  Primarily Caputo 00 flour, with a few tablespoons of organic whole wheat thrown in
• 240 g of filtered water, heated just a bit (maybe to 85-90 degrees), just to get it warmer than room temp
• 2 t quick rising yeast
• 1 T sea salt

1. Put the water in a mixing bowl and sprinkle the yeast on top.  Let it sit a few minutes.
2. Measure out 75% of the flour, including the whole wheat, and mix in the salt.
3. On a relatively low speed, mix in the flour for about 2 minutes
4. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit for 20 minutes
5. Uncover and start mixing again on a low speed.  (I'm using something in the "2" range on our Kitchenaid mixer.)
6. After about 5 minutes, begin mixing in the remainder of the flour.  This should take about 3 more minutes.  In the last minute or two, increase the speed a bit to about "4" on a Kitchenaid mixer--nothing speedy.
7. Cover and let sit for 20 minutes.
8. Turn the fairly wet dough out onto a floured surface and divide it into 2 balls.  Each will weigh about 310-315g.
9. In two bowls, each sprayed lightly with olive oil, put each ball of dough and cover with plastic wrap.
10. In a warm spot (we use the side oven, turned off, but getting the ambient heat from the big oven warming up), let rise for about 90 minutes.
11. Turn each of the balls of dough out onto the floured surface.  Stretch the top of the dough from each side, around to the bottom, and join.  Cover and let sit for about 20 minutes.

At this point, the dough will have considerable resilience and can be worked into two 13" pizzas easily.  I roughly shape them into small (6-8") circles, with more dough in the middle, and begin stretching them out or using one form or another of tossing to take them to 13".

Here's a picture of the Super Bowl pizzas.  The crust was browner than it appears here.  Chalk up the whiteness to the flash.

Like the Wife of Bath, I’d like to think that experience is where it’s at, with the first-hand exploration of great challenges rebutting authority.  Sadly, again like the Wife of Bath, I find it’s all a bit more complicated than that, and particularly so when it comes to pizza. Yeah, experience is important.  Critically important.  On the other hand, there’s plenty a person would never encounter without our authorities, without proficient guides.  Earlier in my blog, I wrote in a particularly earnest way about my pizza dough recipe and techniques.  Indeed, I find many authorities that give the same weak attention to the subtleties of a good dough.  Those authorities are reputable pizza cookbooks, cookbooks that I continue to value for, at the very least, their creative attention to toppings.  Nevertheless, there is a need for deep and powerful attention when it comes to pizza crust, and I’d like to set the record straight right here and now, and repudiate that earlier recipe.

The tradition that I’d like to invoke here is that of Vera Pizza Napoletana.  I’m more agnostic than most about the things I crave.  I prefer East Carolina barbeque over anything to the west, south or north, but I love my pig enough that I’ll gratefully and very happily eat any of them.  I’ll also readily acknowledge that there are many good pizzas that are not defined by EU regulation.  Nonetheless, if you’re going to strive for something, VPN is the apex of pizza making and the thing worth striving for.  So, with regard to repudiation:  none of that foofy stuff in the dough, forget the wine, honey, oil and all other novelties, and go for that simple  flour, water, yeast and salt mixture of Vera Pizza Napoletana.

My family has been witness to an extraordinary phenomenon, as I’ve worked my way from success to failure and back to success again.  As I said, it would be great to say that we can chalk all of this up to experience, but authority really does come into play.  It was experience that helped me to develop an approximation of a great pizza, with small variations on the dough and different approaches to cooking (e.g., see my Big Green Egg pizza post).  I ratcheted it all up, trying for a decent VPN, and produced a number of attrocities that were hardly edible.  The web is a wonderful place, and at this point I’d like to acknowledge a few of the authorities that help make a difference when you’re striving to make a great and authentic Napoletana pizza.  First off, there’s Forno Bravo, a source that’s extraordinary not only for its helpful recipe and tips on techniques, but also for its sourcing of ingredients and supplies.  I also need to give recognition to Jeff Varasano’s site, which is a wonderful source of information on techniques (particularly related to hydration--see his notes on autolysing).  Ironically, Jeff’s site is a paean to the very experience that I’m calling into question here, and I have to disagree with Jeff’s assessment of, say, A16.  (Sometimes, I think, our hearts overrule our taste buds.)  And then there’s A16 itself, and though there’s no web presence to help the budding pizza maker through, their cookbook (A16:  Food and Wine) is a fine source from a finer restaurant.

I’d like to heartily recommend these sites, and particularly the Forno Bravo recipe and Jeff Varasano’s review of techniques, and then adding to this consultation of authority as much experience as you can muster.   Don't rely on what I'm writing here.  Use the Forno Bravo recipe, consider their advice to measure by weight rather than by volume, borrow Jeff Varasano's technique on autolysing and pay attention to hydration.  Start by using a hot conventional oven and, of course, a pizza stone, and don’t mess with the Big Green Egg while you’re trying to get your technique down (too many variables).  Remember that even if you’re going to hack your self-cleaning oven like Jeff, your dough won’t get that nice finish on the bottom unless you go with wood-fired cooking, and once you perfect your technique with the dough, that’s when you want to throw your Big Green Egg (or whatever else you can lay your hands on) into the mix.  Consider the value of these authorities as you develop your experience.

I’ll close with a fine example and tale from the other night.  I made two pizzas for our growing household (Maria and I, Nick staying up later, and Maria's mom with us for the winter months).  I made a more conventional pizza for the less ambitious:  Maria’s mom is skeptical about exotic toppings and just prefers pepperoni.  This one I cooked at 550 degrees in a convection oven on a fire brick pizza stone.   At the same time, I made a pizza for Maria and me.  The toppings consisted of a few tablespoons of what you might call a tapenade (more in a moment), a similar amount of arugula pesto, and generous amounts of freshly imported buffalo mozzarella.  The tapenade was an experiment that included 1/4 c of kalamata olives, a couple of anchovies, 1 T of capers and a single chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, all blended with a small amount of olive oil and salt.   This one was cooked on the Big Green Egg, and the difference in the crust was remarkable.  Both were great, but I can only imagine what we'll be able to do one when we have a wood-fired pizza oven.

We use James McNair's New Pizza cookbook for this recipe, reducing all of the ingredients significantly (particularly the pancetta--halve it) to keep the toppings lighter.  Check out the recipe here on G3's website:  http://gastronomical3.wordpress.com/2007/09/15/transitions/.  Of course I'm a sucker for the pancetta, and the way that the leeks respond to the heat and begin to melt slightly into the mixture of ingredients is amazing.

Re the Big Green Egg, I'm still working on getting this right, but using a very high heat for short cooking periods is working well.  Most take about 10 minutes, tops, and though it's possible to avoid the small amounts of black you see in the crust pictured, we actually like the taste and try to go for a tiny bit of scorching around the edges.   650 degrees is ideal, and having everything pre-heated is critical.  Of course my BGE gasket is toast, but I haven't missed it.

I'd also like to use this opportunity to publicly swear off the foofy recipe I published in one of my earliest entries.  I've become convinced that simple is better or, better yet, simple is perfect.  I've become devoted to the Forno Bravo pizza dough recipe, a simple mixture of flour, water, yeast and salt.

In doing this, of course, we raise many questions:

Is this an effort that will compete with Google Book Search?
We believe in the value the private sector can bring to great challenges like discovery, but we also believe that our commitment to permanence sets us apart from private sector efforts.  Should Google or Microsoft lose interest or should their stockholders question the corporate commitment to these large bodies of information, these companies will move on to other problems.  The libraries that have initiated this effort are committed to the long-term preservation and availability of their content; doing so is part of their fundamental identity as research libraries.  Moreover, it is always likely that research libraries will support uses that the private sector does not value.  Consider, for example, data mining and other types of analysis.  We will be working to support this type of activity for the researchers of our institutions, and for the public more broadly.  You can be sure that when something in the HathiTrust is cited, you can always return to that source, to confirm, refute or build on previous work.

If HathiTrust strives to support access, what about access to its in-copyright materials?
The member institutions of HathiTrust obey the law and do not believe that, for example, "fair use" can be construed to mean authenticated access to this entire body of material for all of our users.  However, we do and will support many lawful uses of the in-copyright materials.  Under the terms of Section 108 of US copyright law, we may provide limited access to works that are in jeopardy and that are not readily available on the market.  In addition, for the first time ever, through the use of appropriate technologies we will be able to provide broad library access to many disabled users.  We also hope to work with rights holders to broaden access, not only to our constituencies, but to the world.  And, at the very least, one basic appropriate use is the preservation of this content.

Is HathiTrust a digital archiving effort to end all digital archiving efforts?
We believe that HathiTrust occupies an important space in a valuable and growing area of work by our community.  Where Portico works with publishers to curate actively published journal content, HathiTrust will serve as the vehicle for preserving books and many journals (particularly journals that have ceased publication).  We intend to grow HathiTrust in many ways, but we will also work actively with organizations like Portico, OCLC and CLOCKSS to strengthen the support our community gives to preserving digital content.

Is the content of HathiTrust "open"? 
The library partners who have created HathiTrust are committed to broad access to the content in this digital library.  Hundreds of thousands of public domain works are already available in HathiTrust, and not simply to the communities immediately served by our libraries.  We understand that many would like to copy large numbers of digitized works from HathiTrust, and where we have appropriate rights (for tens of thousands of volumes already), we will make that possible.  We know that this openness provides the greatest benefit to our users, and we will work to make the content in the HathiTrust more accessible as time goes on.

HathiTrust faces many issues going forward--the quality of the content deposited, challenges to digital preservation, governance and cost models --but HathiTrust has demonstrated success and efficiency in overcoming significant challenges it has faced thus far. By leveraging the capabilities of large-scale digitization and bringing together key partners, HathiTrust will create a new way for libraries to work together to ensure that the great values we have always stood for are supported well into the future.

If you're devoted to making pizza, you know heat is a big part of success. Our home oven, part of a big dual-fuel setup, uses convection and does a solid 550 degrees without resorting to crazy stuff like hacking the latch for the self-cleaning oven. (Yeah, believe it or not, it's been done.) A colleague with a similar obsession has complained that his oven doesn't reach these temps, and pictures of his pizzas show it. It's gotta be hot and it's gotta cook quickly: you want it brown without the pizza getting dried out. And although heat is a key piece, what every pizza maker knows s/he really wants is a wood-fired pizza oven. Now this is not as absurd a dream as you'd think. There are several models designed for home use (see forno bravo or le panyol, for example), and at least one I've run into is designed so that you can use it indoors--maybe it doubles as an inefficient heat source. However, as technically feasible as a home wood-fired oven is, it feels like a big investment. I can dream, of course.

In the meantime, we recently ran into something called the Big Green Egg. This thing, a kamado-style cooker, generates extremely high heat, serves primarily as a grill, doubles as an oven (and a smoker), and (though still pricey) costs a lot less than a wood-fired oven. Maria and I grill a lot and wanted to incorporate things like spatchcocked chickens into our repertoire, so we decided to give the Big Green Egg a shot.

My first effort at this was relatively successful, with a few problems that leave me opportunities for refining things. I should note that it's relatively easy to get the Big Green Egg up to a mighty 650 degrees and the BGE has available to it accessories (like the "plate-setter") that makes this process pretty straightforward. With the plate setter in place, I went with an American Metalcraft PS1575, a pizza stone made from fire brick and thus much safer for these high heats. (The PS1575 is supposed to be 15.75" in diameter. Mine was a full 16" and may have contributed to some minor damage to my gasket.) This left ample room to slide the pizza onto the stone without losing ingredients over the side. At 650 degrees, the pizza cooked in slightly more than 10 minutes. As you'll see in the two pictures below, this created a nicely cooked crust with a little (and very tasty) burning below, and browned toppings. For this first effort, I stuck with a classic margherita:

This was, without a doubt, the best home pizza crust we've ever done, and considering the number of pizzas we've cooked, that's saying something. The crust was noticeably more flavorful and the whole thing did have a slightly smoky taste. I'll admit that I expected the pizza to be no different from the ones we've cooked in the oven, but I was definitely wrong.

As usual, I won't try to reproduce the wealth of information on the web about cooking a pizza on a Big Green Egg. The very helpful Naked Whiz site does a very nice job covering all elements of cooking pizza on the Big Green Egg, including addressing issues of the size of the pizza stone.

What challenges lie ahead? I've had a hard time getting my BGE over 650 degrees and would like to try a slightly higher temperature. In putting the pizza into the BGE, I need to get in and out a little more quickly to avoid losing temperature. And I'm going to need to explore what the issues are around the gasket burning, a problem that might be related to the size of the stone, but which was just as likely to be a result of the gasket having been poorly installed (and protruding into the BGE).

In preparation for a recent talk in China (the challenges and opportunities for digital libraries), I talked to Kat and Josh about the extent of OAIster data not findable through standard web searches. That so much of our digital library content is not findable through standard search engines has always been a troublesome issue, and I would have expected that with the passage of time, this particular problem have been solved. It hasn't, and that has made me wonder about what we do in digital libraries and how we do it.

Kat's and Josh's numbers are compelling. OAIster focuses on the hidden web--resources not typically stored as files in a crawlable web directory--and so OAIster, with its 16 million records, is a particularly good resource for finding digital library resources. Kat and Josh conclude that more than 55% of the content in OAIster can't be found in Google.

As much as I like Kat's and Josh's analysis, I draw a different conclusion from the data. They write that, "[g]iven the resulting numbers from our investigation, it seems that Google needs to do much more to gather hidden resources." This perspective is one many of us share. We're inclined to point a finger at Google (or other search engines) and wish they tried harder to look into our arcane systems. We believe that if only Google and others had a deeper appreciation of our content or tried harder, this problem would go away. I've been fortunate enough to be able to try to advance this argument one-on-one with the heads of Google and Google Scholar, and their responses are similar--too much trouble for the value of the content. As time has passed, I've come to agree.

Complexity in digital library resources is at the heart of our work, and is frankly one reason why many of us find the work so interesting. Anyone who thinks that the best way to store the 400,000 pages (140+ million words) of the texts in the Patrologia Latina is as a bunch of static web pages knows nothing of the uses or users of that resource or what's involved in managing it. Similarly, to effectively manage the tens of thousands of records for a run-of-the-mill image collection, you can't store them as individual HTML pages lacking well-defined fields and relationships. These things are obvious to people in our profession.

We often go wrong, however, when we try to share our love of complexity with the consumers. We've come to understand that success in building our systems involves making complicated uses possible without at the same time requiring the user to have a complicated understanding of the resource. What we must also learn is that a simplified rendering of the content, so that it can be easily found by the search engines, is not an unfortunate compromise, but rather a necessary part of our work.

Will it be possible in all cases to break down the walls between the complex resources and the simple ways that web crawlers need to understand them? Absolutely not. The growing sophistication of the search engines does ensure that it gets easier with time, however. About a decade ago, we tried populating directories with tiny HTML files created from records in image databases. The crawlers gave up after picking up a few thousand records, apparently daunted by the vastness of this content. Now, however, this sort of approach works and only requires patience as the crawlers make repeated passes over the content. Large and complex text collections can by modeled as simplified text files, and the search engines can be tricked into pointing the user to the appropriate entry point for the work from which the text is drawn.

One thing the analysis of the OAIster data shows is that, as a community, we have not availed ourselves of these relatively simple solutions to making our resources more widely discoverable. Not all of the challenges of modeling digital library resources are this easy. There are bigger challenges that require more creative solutions, but creating these solutions is part of the job of putting the resources online, not a nuisance or distraction from that job.

Impact
One of the most interesting things about all of this is the great impact that’s possible with relatively modest resources. Experienced library staff in technical services—staff with considerable experience in various sorts of bibliographic work like copy- and original cataloging—review publications and use a variety of tools to make determinations about a book’s copyright status. In most cases, those staff can reliably confirm that the work is in the public domain or in copyright. Because their work is driven by content that has been digitized and is online, if the work has been determined to be in the public domain, we update records that control access to the materials and permit access.

I say “modest” and I know that this will seem odd to some colleagues at smaller libraries or other types of libraries, but in terms of research library staffing, the 1.5 FTE of professional staffing we devote to this work has a profound effect. Yes, of course more infrastructure is necessary than just these technical services staff members, but the processes in our library IT organization handle input from their work in overwhelmingly automated ways, creating lists of works to be reviewed and updating records about the rights status of the works. Compare this number to any other area of materials processing in a research library and the numbers seem modest. Consider, moreover, the fact that these staff process more than 2,000 titles each month, and that the majority of these works are found to be in the public domain. At our current rate of work, we’ll open access to over 15,000 titles in about one year of work. That would be a phenomenal number in the pre-Google days of our digitization (I believe we digitized about 9,000 volumes in our peak year of preservation-related digitization work), and focuses on more current publications than we typically see in digitization. For a relatively small sum, we’re benefiting our own constituency as well as readership throughout the Internet. No matter how you cut it, this feels like a good investment in library funds.

What is “library work”?
Once you get past the question of whether digitization is “library work,” it seems frivolous to ask whether this kind of copyright-determination work is also the work of libraries, but I think it’s very clearly a question for some of my colleagues. The copyright determination work involves several steps where our staff are particularly skilled, and the outcomes seem right up our alley. What sort of outcomes? Clearly access is a big one, but one doesn’t need a lot of imagination to understand that our preservation work (particularly of these digital files) is benefited by the increased access. The skills piece is particularly germane, though. Doing this work depends on knowledge of bibliographic description, of the sorts of variability in practice that one sees between a book as it leaves the printer and the ways that it’s described in everything from library catalogs (including OCLC WorldCat) to the Library of Congress’s copyright registration records. It’s also work that depends on recognizing the traps that come along with copyright, like the possibility that a US work was previously published abroad and thus may still be eligible for copyright protection. These things come naturally to a person well versed in bibliographic description: people who have been employed in processes that create the same sorts of records they are now being asked to review.

I’m a big fan of mainstreaming. In a conversation with a library director at another institution, a director who was once director of technical services, I found myself arguing that this work is the work of technical services, much to her dismay. I’m certain some institutions would be tempted to build out a separate unit devoted to this new activity, populated by bright young staff who have never worked their way through descriptive work using everything from the pre-1956 National Union Catalog to ancient card records to the once great variety of “bibliographic utilities” (RLIN, OCLC, WLN and the rest), but what we would lose in that sort of staffing model is a sort of skill that comes along with recognizing variations in descriptive practice and the great variety of publishing practices that we see in the materials themselves. By relying on existing technical services staff members, we have those skills and a sensitivity to the need to create sustainable, routinized activities.

Not the common wisdom
Some readers will have noticed that my numbers don’t add up to what we have generally considered to be the distribution between in-copyright and public domain for US 1923-1963 publications. When we talk about US renewals, lots of numbers are bandied about, some numbers are based on very early analyses, and some numbers are based on reasonable sample-based analyses. The most common estimate is that only 15% of US books published between 1923 and 1963 had their copyright renewed. Our fairly random selection of titles has generated very different numbers: we’re finding renewals for about 30% of the works in our queue, with another 10% having problems that are complex enough (e.g., possibly previous foreign publication or the inclusion of works such as short stories or poems by multiple authors).

I should say a little bit about our processes and the way that our queue may be influencing these numbers. As either Michigan or Google digitizes volumes and they flow back into our repository, we cull candidate titles for review. We rely on fixed fields in the MARC records to find candidate titles (i.e., monographs published in the US between 1923-1963). We tend to prefer those materials that have been digitized or processed more recently, as the quality of processing improves over time and we’d like to optimize our impact. To date, most of the candidate volumes have been drawn from our storage facility (Buhr), and so tend to be lower circulation titles in poorer condition. These facts, by themselves, shouldn’t skew our numbers or, if they do, should skew the selection toward volumes where the copyright wasn’t renewed because the title was less popular. In any case, it’s hard to imagine that our collection, which is fairly comprehensive for the period, would tend to be anything but representative, and yet the numbers are running very high for renewals. Of course I’d be happier to find that 85% of the works are in the public domain, but I continue to be encouraged to find that 60% of the works are in the public domain.

It’s far too soon to say if these numbers will hold or if there are other factors at work, but after having reviewed more than 25,000 volumes, the fairly constant pattern emerging should interest many who watch this space.

More to say, more to do
I didn’t intend to address the wealth of related issues in this space, but wanted to get these few thoughts down to start the conversation. Someone from Michigan should discuss how the work gets done, what the liabilities are for making mistakes, the various ways that we could make mistakes (did I hear the word “restoration”?), whether we should be doing the work in isolation, and many other topics. I will close with beginning to address the last question, however. We have long advocated sharing this work among many institutions and saw the Google digitization effort as one tremendous stimulus to creating some thoughtful, reliable group sourcing. In discussions with a very sympathetic General Counsel’s office, we concluded that the work of making these determinations would be strengthened by collaboration—double-blind or triple-blind tests of status, if you will. This winter, Anne Karle-Zenith on our staff wrote a proposal to IMLS for the creation of a multi-institutional queuing and vetting mechanism, and our friends at Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin wrote letters offering their enthusiastic support. I hope we will one day be doing this work in a well-documented and open group space, with contributions by many institutions. After all, while this really is library work, when it comes to US publications, there’s a bounded body of candidates, and by sharing this work our community can add several thousand titles to the known public domain.

I think all of this debate begs us to ask the question "what is open"? For the longest time (since the mid-1990's), Michigan digitized public domain content and made it freely viewable, searchable and printable. Anyone, anywhere could come to a collection like Making of America and read, search and print to his heart's delight. If the same user wanted to download the OCR, that too was made possible and, in fact, the Distributed Proofreader's project has made good use of this and other MOA functionality. We didn't make it possible for anyone to get a collection of our source files because we were actively involved in setting up Print-on-Demand (POD), POD typically has up-front, per-title costs, and making the source files available would have cost us some sales that might otherwise pay for that initial investment. As we moved into the agreement with Google, we made clear our intention to do the same "open" thing with the Google-digitized content, and to throw in our lot with a (then) yet-to-be-defined multi-institutional "Shared Digital Repository." In fact, now we have hundreds of thousands of public domain works online, all of which are readable, searchable and printable by anyone in the world in much the same way.

So, what's the beef? The OCA FAQ states that for them this openness means that "textual material will be free to read, and in most cases, available for saving or printing using formats such as PDF." By all means! I hope it's clear by what I wrote above that this is an utterly accurate description of what happens when Google digitizes a volume from Michigan's collection and Michigan puts it online. It's also, incidentally, what Google makes possible, but even if Google didn't, Michigan could and would be rushing in to fill that breach. The challenges to Google's openness always seem to ignore what's actually possible through our copies at Michigan. This sort of polarizing rhetoric seems to be about making a point that's not accurate in the service of an attack on Google's primacy in this space: we don't want them to dominate the landscape, so let's characterize their Bad version as being the opposite of our Good version. This notion that what Google does is closed is not an accurate description of Google's version of these books, and even less so a description of Michigan's.

Could the Google books be more open? Absolutely. Along with Carl Malamud, for example, I would love to see all of the government documents that have been digitized by Google available for transfer to other entities so that the content could be improved and integrated into a wide variety of systems, thus opening up our government as well as our libraries. I believe that will happen, in fact, and that Google will one day (after they've had a chance to gain some competitive advantage) open up far more. In the meantime, however, when we talk about "open," let's mean it the way that the OCA FAQ means it. Let's mean it in the same way that the bulk of our audience means it. Let's talk about the ability to read, cite and search the contents of these books, and let's call the Google Books project and particularly Michigan's copies Open. Let's stop being theoretical, er, I mean polemical.

Introduction
I am an academic librarian who works in research libraries, so I see the questions being posed here (and the issue of LIS education generally) through that lens. My perspective is tied significantly to the interplay of information resources and the research uses to which they are put. There are, I think, many reasonable ways to approach these questions, but mine is about this interplay and the need for professionals in my sphere to support an array of activities around research and teaching, including authentication and curation of the products of research.

Technical and social phenomena we see coming in the next 10 years
The technical and social phenomena that seem most significant surround a tension in the perception that disintermediation plays an increasingly evident role in the information space of research institutions.

On the one hand, we see intensifying disintermediation, and along with that an increasingly rich array of tools and technology that facilitate academic users interacting directly with their sources, and directly with the means for dissemination. At the same time, in tension with this disintermediation, we see a drive by competing mediating open systems to facilitate that disintermediation: Google's preeminence makes it an obvious example of this sort of mediation; smaller players (Flickr, Facebook, others) may only fill niche roles, but have come to play the same sort of mediating role.

The irony in this dynamic is that many (or even most) of the most compelling resources have not been peer-to-peer resources, but networked resources like Google or even WorldCat. Consequently, in this world of growing disintermediation, we do not see, primarily, peer-to-peer services predominating, but rather very compelling social networking services that act as a powerful set of intermediaries. Openness at the network layer has become much more important than even "open source" because the services (rather than the software) are the destinations. At the outset, then, in this small space, what I would like to highlight is a growing sense of agency by users in the academic research world, and agency facilitated not by specialized software on their desktops, but by mediating services that those users can leverage to accomplish remarkable things.

In this context of what we've come to think of as "in the flow" (i.e., in the flow of engagement between the user and the mediating network resource), academic research libraries are challenged to perform core functions (functions, such as archiving and instruction, that have not diminished in importance) at the same time that they are challenged to perform their work with users "in the flow." Significantly, the research library must continue to serve a critical curatorial role for cultural heritage information despite the sense that the information being used is everywhere and perhaps thus cared for by the network. While they engage with this challenge of what sometimes feels like trying to catch the wind in a net, academic research libraries must craft a new role more clearly focused on engagement with scholarly communication. They must simultaneously reach out to and become a natural part of the working environment and methods of their users, and engage in the strategic curation of the human record.[1] Around this apparent or real disintermediation with increasingly powerful intermediaries, we need to ensure perpetual access and the right sorts of services to our communities.

Key unanswered questions that should drive research
The problem, as I see it, is that the set of questions evolves as quickly as the environment. So, for example, some current questions include:

• What are the tools, services and systems that optimize the information seeking, use and creation activities of our users? Even in the age of Google, Amazon and Flickr, academic research library systems play a role in discovery of information. For example, although Google Scholar has been shown to be more effective in discovery than metasearch applications, vast numbers of key resources are not indexed by GS and are only found through the cumbersome and arcane specialized interfaces provided by publishers and vendors.[2] Finding effective ways to intercede and assist users (without also putting cumbersome "help" in their way) is one of the challenges for our community. Similarly, a better understanding of the way our users interact with resources is beginning to make it possible for us to layer onto the network an array of tools (e.g., Zotero or the LibX toolbar) that make it possible for users to integrate networked resources into their scholarship. And, finally, libraries have become the equivalent of publishers in the new, networked environment, and ensuring that we perform that role along with curation in seamless and effective ways is one of our current challenges.[3] All of this raises a number of embedded questions, some related to understanding the behavior of users, others to deploying the most effective technologies, and yet others to judging what the next great technological innovation will be and where we can situate ourselves.
• How can we most effectively curate the human record in a world that is simultaneously more interconnected and, in some ways, more fragmented?
  • It’s worth noting that even though the network holds out promise for unifying formally-defined "library collections" in a way never before imagined, the fact that many resources are rare or valuable or have significant artifactual value means that the "scatter" of unique parts of collections that we already know well will only become more pronounced (if only by contrast). For example, our making digital surrogates available will remove most, but not all, need for scholars to travel to Michigan to use the papyrus collection.
  • This problem of the artifact obviously represents a marginal case. More significantly, as we are increasingly able to provide electronic access to our print collections, we are faced with the need to develop effective strategies for storing print and balancing access with minimizing waste. It obviously doesn’t make sense to store a copy of ordinary works at each of more than 100 research libraries in the United States, but how can an amalgamation of collections be performed in ways that respect current user preferences for print and takes into account bibliographic ambiguity (e.g., is my copy the same as your copy, and when there are differences, how much variation should be preserved)? We need to document this in a way that ensures a comprehensive sense of curatorial responsibility so that, for example, one institution does not withdraw a "last copy" of a volume by assuming (incorrectly) that it is acting in isolation.
  • Finally, and perhaps most compellingly, there is the question of what constitutes effective digital curation and how (and to what extent) we should balance that curation with access. There is much that we know about appropriate digital formats, migration, and the design of effective archiving services, but this has not been put to the test with the grand challenge that is looming. Moreover, as we provide access, we are challenged by questions of usability, and even more by the question of how we best situate our access services relative to network services. We should not duplicate Google's work in Google Book Search, but there are services Google may not or will not offer, and that we should in agile and relevant ways.

The curriculum we should provide to train professionals in this changing environment
Working from this perspective, it strikes me that the LIS curriculum should focus on developing a method of engagement rather than primarily training to answer specific questions. Of course that focus on methodology must be grounded in an exploration of specific contemporary questions, but it should be made clear that the circumstances of those questions are likely to change (i.e., the journey will be more important than the destination). Perhaps this is obvious or has always been the case, but the incredible fluidity of the environment now calls for precisely this type of response. Some recent experience may help to illustrate this:

• In our efforts to better understand how mass digitization work succeeds and fails, we have needed to understand the distribution of certain types of materials in our collection. Being able to articulate the question and then pursue strategies for mitigating problems (and increase opportunities) has called for analytical skills and an understanding of research methods, including statistical skills. In a recent specific case, we needed to understand the interaction between particular methods of digitization and different methods of printing (e.g., reproduction of typescript versus offset printing). The methods of digitization are squarely within the field of current librarianship, as is an understanding of the types of materials we collect and own; and it is equally true that both the digitization methods and types of materials will change with time. What I would emphasize is that it is the skills involved in the inquiry that are paramount. Though they are in no way divorced from the specific problems that one tackles, they are the most important part of the educational process.
• In filling the niche left by Google because of legal constraints and a genuine lack of interest in academic uses of materials, we have embarked on a process of system design and software development. This effort has required of staff not only the ability to write effective code (or manage writing that code), but also the ability to chart courses informed by usability, by an understanding of the law (particularly copyright law), and by a deep understanding of the digital archiving effort (both in formats and in strategies for storage). There is no doubt in my mind that librarians will continue to play a role in the effective design of information systems, and that navigating these parameters (i.e., usability, legal issues, sustainability of the systems and, more importantly, the content) will continue to play a role in the systems we design. Just as with the previous example, those skills cannot be developed or exercised in some way that is abstracted from the materials, the users, and the uses. Again, just as with the previous example, current contexts will change, and the skills and instincts will continue to be the enduring element in our future librarians.

Because of space constraints, these are only two examples, but examples that show the range of skills and approaches necessary in the current environment. The current environment is extremely fluid in the ways that information is made available and in the ways that users, specifically those in our academic community, interact with it. Too often, academic libraries are defined by that which is held in them (witness the importance of the ARL volume count for defining research libraries). Libraries are, above all else, the people, processes, and resources that connect users and information and, unlike organizations like Google or Amazon, libraries are predicated on a commitment to enduring, reliable access to that information. Libraries curate the growing body of human knowledge and through that curation ensure its longevity and reliability; libraries need to make sure that the right kinds of services and interactions are taking place "in the flow," where (disintermediation or not) users have much more agency and much more direct interaction with networked resources. LIS education should focus its efforts on ensuring that the next generation of academic librarians has an awareness of the issues and an aptitude for designing solutions in that world.

Notes
[1] It is probably also the case that libraries, in order to have the opportunity to play these service roles in the future, must prove the importance of the curatorial function and their ability to perform it.
[2] For example, see Haya, Glenn et al. "Metalib and Google Scholar: a user study," in Online Information Review, Vol. 31 No. 3, 2007, pp. 365-375.
[3] See, for example, the work of the UM Library's Scholarly Publishing Office (http://spo.lib.umich.edu/) in creating new scholarly publications with sustainable methods, or Deep Blue, the Library's institutional repository (http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/).