The Third Library and the Commons

One of the overarching institutional goals of the academic library is to build a “knowledge archive openly accessible to all members of society” (Argyres and Liebeskind 1998, 428). The discourse of academic libraries and librarianship often refers to this archive as a knowledge commons, which serves as a rhetorical affirmation of the principle that knowledge is an outgrowth of human social cooperation, and is thus properly understood as a collectively owned resource. The ideal of a knowledge commons is undoubtedly an inspiring one, and serves as a North Star that helps to orient the academic library’s institutional values and goals. But what, in particular, is required for the ideal of the knowledge commons to be instantiated? What is the work to be done, and what obstacles might stand in the way?

Libraries and the Possibilities of the Knowledge Commons in the Digital Age

Hess and Ostrom (2007, 13) note that libraries have long played a role as social institutions responsible for mediating access to the knowledge commons, as well as preserving and stewarding this collective knowledge on behalf of the community and future generations. In the analog era, when the knowledge stored and organized within the library was inscribed in physical, place-bound materials, the library was constrained to serve patrons within a geographically delimited locale; in the context of the academic library, this locale was the campus community, and perhaps the surrounding geographic community as well.

Academic libraries in this era mediated access to the knowledge commons using an “outside-in” service model (Dempsey and Malpas 2018), under which they acquired physical materials from various external sources and organized these materials into legible collections that their patrons could access within libraries’ physical buildings. In aspiring to become a universal library (Battles 2015), each library in effect sought to become a self-contained knowledge commons, and the library’s services aimed to facilitate access to this commons for all who entered.

This “outside-in” service model remains essential to the academic library’s identity and social role, but the digital revolution has enabled libraries to supplement this traditional relationship to the knowledge commons with a novel “inside-out” service model that expands its institutional reach (Dempsey and Malpas 2018). Under the inside-out service model that has developed in the digital age, the library devotes its efforts not simply to organizing its collections so that patrons can access the knowledge commons through the resources held within the library’s physical building (as in the outside-in model), but also to disseminating its distinctive collections and the original intellectual contributions of the university community far beyond the campus gates.

In Demsey and Malpas’s (2018) words, the “inside-out” academic library’s mission is to share….[its] institution’s unique intellectual products [including] archives and special collections, or newly generated research and learning materials (e.g., e-prints, research data, courseware, digital scholarly resources etc.)…with potential users outside the institution” (74).

Efforts to build this “inside-out” library, and thereby disseminate previously place-bound knowledge resources through digital means, is a systemic trend. One prominent example of this trend is the proliferation of institutional repositories dedicated to making university-created knowledge an accessible part of the broader knowledge commons. As different libraries pursue the project of grafting the “inside-out” library onto the traditional suite of their “outside-in” services, these individual efforts have evolved into a broader collaborative effort to build a more general knowledge archive that extends the traditional project of the knowledge commons to the digital realm.

Indeed, the institutional and disciplinary repositories that are at the heart of the “inside-out” library’s infrastructure have the potential to maintain their individual distinctiveness, while simultaneously coalescing into a more general repository of knowledge that further expands and democratizes the knowledge commons by making it accessible (in principle) to users throughout society at zero marginal cost.

We are already witnessing the emergence of such a repository in real time. Concerted efforts are gathering pace to develop common standards and conventions for these repositories, with a view toward connecting these individual knowledge archives in ways that facilitate the process of discovery for end-users. In the context of a discussion of digital open-access repositories, Suber (2012) documents this process and some of its goals:

The most useful OA repositories comply with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), which makes separate repositories play well together. In the jargon, OAI compliance makes repositories interoperable, allowing the worldwide network of individual repositories to behave like a single grand virtual repository that can be searched all at once. It means that users can find a work in an OAI-compliant repository without knowing which repositories exist, where they are located, or what they contain (55).

 While this “single grand virtual repository” remains a work in progress, its emergence as a prospective goal signifies a meaningful expansion in the scope of the library’s longstanding project of helping to build, steward, and facilitate access to the knowledge commons. Moreover, the goal of building the inside-out library, and ultimately linking these libraries into a “single grand virtual repository” that might serve as a unified knowledge commons for the digital age, has also contributed to the development of novel changes in some of the library’s practices and instruments, as various innovations—spanning areas such as software, catalog search algorithms, digital repositories, digital catalogs of metadata, databases, digital curation and data management workflows—are adopted in the course of building this expanded commons. In short, these novel technologies and practices are deployed with a view toward advancing the library’s traditional goal of supporting a democratic knowledge commons, but on a more ambitious and comprehensive scale; the modern project of the knowledge commons reflects this dialectic of continuity and change.

Knowledge Capitalism Against the Knowledge Commons

This dialectic is unfolding against the backdrop of substantial changes in the political economy of capitalism. To understand the Third Library’s prospects as a steward of the knowledge commons, therefore, it is necessary to understand its relationship to this political economy.

Social scientists and observers have noted a marked shift in the past few decades, particularly in advanced industrialized countries such as the United States, “from an economy based on natural resources and physical inputs to one based on intellectual assets” (Powell and Snellman 2004, 215). These changes have shaped the emergence of a novel mode of capitalist production and accumulation, labeled “knowledge capitalism” (Burton-Jones 1999; Olssen and Peters 2005), under which the private ownership of ideas and knowledge has displaced the private ownership of tangible assets as the main wellspring of economic value creation.

Capital accumulation under this regime is driven, in other words, by private firms’ production, ownership, and deployment of ideas, rather than material things (Haskell and Westlake 2018). It is important to note that ideas are not in and of themselves naturally scarce and are therefore very different from the material substances that previously underpinned the accumulation of capital. In the parlance of economics, ideas are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, while material goods tend to be rivalrous and excludable.

Unlike material goods, therefore, ideas are not subject to natural laws of scarcity, and hence do not possess any economic value, properly understood. Before knowledge can acquire economic value and enter the circuits of capital accumulation, a complex political and legal machinery must be deployed to create robust private property rights in knowledge and artificially induce scarcity in the realm of ideas. In effect, this institutional machinery helps to transform knowledge—a naturally abundant (and hence economically valueless) resource—into a scarce and excludable (and hence economically valuable) asset that can serve as the basis for capital accumulation within the regime of knowledge capitalism (Jessop 2007).

In short, knowledge capitalism is an economic regime in which ideas and knowledge fuel capital accumulation. However, “information is not inherently valuable [and] a profound social reorganization is required to turn it into something valuable” that can be accumulated as capital (Schiller 1988, 32; quoted in Jessop 2007, 120). A central example of the institutional and legal architecture that facilitates this social reorganization is contemporary intellectual property law. Traditionally seen as a means to the end of enriching the intellectual and cultural commons, the era of knowledge capitalism has been marked by a dramatic reorientation of intellectual property law in a direction that is more solicitous of private property rights, at the expense of the commons (Brown-Keyder 2007; Vaidhyanathan 2017; Irzik 2007). Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that these changes to the intellectual property regime in the service of knowledge capitalism constitute a “second enclosure movement,” wherein the object of enclosure is not land (as in the first enclosure movement, which involved the expropriation of society’s physical commons), but knowledge itself, which entails the expropriation of the “intangible commons of the mind” (Boyle 2003, 37).

The Knowledge Commons, the Third Library, and the Politics of Resistance

Using the language of enclosure to describe the privatization and commodification of knowledge within modern processes of capital accumulation underscores the intrinsic tension between knowledge capitalism and the ideal of the knowledge commons. In particular, while the project of the knowledge commons is keyed to building and sustaining a shared repository of collectively owned knowledge for the sake of the common good, the impetus of knowledge capitalism is toward the conversion of knowledge into an excludable economic asset for the sake of private profit, which necessarily involves the enclosure of the commons.

The central challenge that libraries must confront in constructing a knowledge commons for the digital era is therefore not a technical or operational challenge, but a fundamentally political one. The challenge, in short, is to resist the encroachments of knowledge capitalism on the knowledge commons, and to defend the democratic ideal of collective access to the products of the human mind. On this account, the emergence of the Third Library as a steward of the knowledge commons will require library staff to politically mobilize in opposition to the excesses of knowledge capitalism, and in favor of a social democratic political vision that supports a decommodified view of social life that keeps faith with the ideal of knowledge as a commons.

To be sure, libraries and library staff are already involved in important political advocacy and institution-building efforts to expand the knowledge commons and defend it from enclosure. One prominent example is of course the open access movement, which aims to provide free and equitable digital access to scholarly materials that currently live behind proprietary gates established by for-profit publishers, who seek to appropriate monopolistic rents through their ownership of the journals that serve as central platforms of scholarly communication (Edlin and Rubinfeld 2004). This movement has been shaped by grassroots efforts, as well as by directives from funding agencies within the government and private sectors (McKiernan 2017).

Within universities in particular, the locus of this organizing activity has been within libraries, which bear the costs of the increasing price of journal subscriptions (i.e., the “serials crisis”) most directly (Shu et al. 2018), and whose institutional mission of expanding society’s knowledge commons is most directly constrained by barriers to open access that are erected by traditional journal publishers. Suber and Whitehead (2020) provide an account of such activities at Harvard, while the open-access efforts of library staff and stakeholders at the University of California have also received considerable attention for their role in framing a broader political agenda (Fox and Brainard 2019).

Other, related movements have also taken shape; library workers have played important agenda-setting and leadership roles in movements for open data, open science, and open source software, all of which require not only technical work, but a political vision for the future of the knowledge commons. This vision has inspired novel institutions, such as Creative Commons, which have recently been built to facilitate the sharing and distribution of intellectual and creative work on a wide scale.

However, while these efforts are to be commended, they do not explicitly offer a critique of knowledge capital or attempt to challenge its prerogatives. The open access movement offers a critique of the abusive practices of a handful of monopolistic corporations, and attempts to mobilize against them. It does not, however, explicitly question the legitimacy of the broader framework of political economy that encourages the privatization and commodification of essential public infrastructure. For example, prominent members of the open access movement take pains to emphasize that open access is entirely compatible with the very intellectual property regime that underpins knowledge capitalism (Suber 2012, 21). Though it may be true that open access can accommodate the basic institutions of knowledge capitalism, this accommodative rhetorical stance is not uncommon within contemporary movements to secure and build a democratic knowledge commons. It is a stance that attempts to finesse the inherent tensions between the broader logic of the commons and the logic of capital accumulation, rather than overcome these tensions by mobilizing politically to defend the knowledge commons against capitalist encroachment.

Another example of this politics of accommodation is Creative Commons. As Hall (2016) observes, “contrary to the way Creative Commons is frequently portrayed . . . it is not advocating a common stock of nonprivately owned (creative) works that everyone jointly manages, shares, and is free to access and use on the same basis . . . which is how the Commons is often understood”; rather, with an orientation that is fundamentally “liberal and individualistic,” it puts forward “not so much a fundamental critique of intellectual property (IP) law or a challenge to it as merely a reform of it” (Hall 2016, 4). To be sure, Creative Commons represents a step forward and deserves praise as an institutional innovation that has advanced the project of the knowledge commons; however, to the extent that it accommodates itself to the legal and institutional architecture that underpins knowledge capital, its potential role in helping to fulfill the democratic and collective possibilities of the commons is necessarily limited (Berry 2005b).

This politics of accommodation is problematic because it takes capitalist constraints on the project of the knowledge commons as given and attempts to work within those parameters, rather than reimagining the political economy and working toward a social democratic system in which those constraints are dissolved through collective action. A Third Library that accepts the subordination of the knowledge commons to knowledge capital would not be worth building, for it would represent a concession to the very forces—of commodification, enclosure, and colonization—that it is meant to challenge and overcome.

If library workers accept the need to engage in this politics of resistance for the sake of achieving a democratic knowledge commons within the Third Library, it naturally invites the question: where to begin? A logical place might be with the universities in which our libraries are embedded. These universities are increasingly important economic institutions within the regime of knowledge capitalism. Indeed, in light of the increased importance of financial autonomy in an era of public disinvestment in higher education, as well as legislative changes that have sought to foster university collaborations with private firms, universities have embraced an increasingly commercial ethos that has turned them into nodes of knowledge-based capital accumulation in their own right.

Washburn (2005), a critic of universities’ increasing orientation to the marketplace, describes various ways in which this manifests in practice:

Universities now routinely operate complex patenting and licensing operations to market their faculty’s inventions (extracting royalty income and other profits and fees in return). They invest their endowment money in risky start-up firms founded by their professors. They run their own industrial parks, venture-capital funds, and for-profit companies, and they publish newsletters encouraging faculty members to commercialize their research by going into business. Often, when a professor becomes the CEO of a new start-up, there is considerable overlap between the research taking place on campus and at the firm, a situation ripe for confusion and conflicts of interest. The question of who owns academic research has grown increasingly contentious, as the openness and sharing that once characterized university life has given way to a new proprietary culture more akin to the business world (LOC 77).

The organization of a movement to resist the increasingly prevalent commercial and proprietary culture of modern universities, which is antithetical to the ideal of the knowledge commons (and inevitably hinders librarians’ efforts to democratize access to knowledge), may therefore offer a natural starting point for a broader political effort by library workers to resist knowledge capitalism and its more general impetus toward the commodification and enclosure of knowledge and information.

This mobilization against the commodification of academic knowledge and the corporatization of the modern university, with a view toward creating the conditions necessary for the knowledge commons to flourish, would undoubtedly be contentious. Indeed, it is fraught with a greater degree of professional risk than narrower campaigns, such as the one for open access, in which library staff and other university stakeholders are able to form a unified front in fighting against the abuses of an external antagonist (i.e., for-profit journal publishers). The push to decommodify the university and reclaim the knowledge it creates as a public good is likely to engender internal opposition, particularly from university stakeholders with a vested interest in the status quo.

If library workers are to engage in the political work of building a Third Library that is a genuine steward of the knowledge commons, and in doing so successfully challenge the excesses of the corporate university that buttresses the regime of knowledge capital at the expense of the commons, it is therefore necessary to build solidarity and mutual trust among the library’s workers, so as to create the conditions necessary for mutual empowerment and collective action. It is also necessary to cultivate a civic imagination that will allow library staff, the library’s patrons, and other university stakeholders to see beyond the horizon of contemporary knowledge capitalism, and to explore ways of remaking the world through democratic, rather than market-driven, governance. Below, we explore how transposing the concept of the commons to the library workplace, and to its physical spaces, may offer us a way to meaningfully pursue these ends.