jeiseman 's List: future of libraries

• The result stands out on the acquisitions budget of every research library: the Journal of Comparative Neurology now costs $25,910 for a year's subscription; Tetrahedron costs $17,969 (or $39,739, if bundled with related publications as a Tetrahedron package); the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490; and the ripple effects have damaged intellectual life throughout the world of learning. Owing to the skyrocketing cost of serials, libraries that used to spend 50 percent of their acquisitions budget on monographs now spend 25 percent or less. University presses, which depend on sales to libraries, cannot cover their costs by publishing monographs. And young scholars who depend on publishing to advance their careers are now in danger of perishing.
• The eighteenth-century Republic of Letters had been transformed into a professional Republic of Learning, and it is now open to amateurs—amateurs in the best sense of the word, lovers of learning among the general citizenry. Openness is operating everywhere, thanks to "open access" repositories of digitized articles available free of charge, the Open Content Alliance, the Open Knowledge Commons, OpenCourseWare, the Internet Archive, and openly amateur enterprises like Wikipedia. The democratization of knowledge now seems to be at our fingertips. We can make the Enlightenment ideal come to life in reality.
• Yet if we permit the commercialization of the content of our libraries, there is no getting around a fundamental contradiction. To digitize collections and sell the product in ways that fail to guarantee wide access would be to repeat the mistake that was made when publishers exploited the market for scholarly journals, but on a much greater scale, for it would turn the Internet into an instrument for privatizing knowledge that belongs in the public sphere. No invisible hand would intervene to correct the imbalance between the private and the public welfare. Only the public can do that, but who speaks for the public? Not the legislators of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
• Libraries say, "Digitize we must." But not on any terms. We must do it in the interest of the public, and that means holding the digitizers responsible to the citizenry.
• They want to control the game, to take it over, to own it. They compete among themselves, of course, but so ferociously that they kill each other off. Their struggle for survival is leading toward an oligopoly; and whoever may win, the victory could mean a defeat for the public good.
• hat provoked these jeremianic- utopian reflections? Google. Four years ago, Google began digitizing books from research libraries, providing full-text searching and making books in the public domain available on the Internet at no cost to the viewer. For example, it is now possible for anyone, anywhere to view and download a digital copy of the 1871 first edition of Middlemarch that is in the collection of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Everyone profited, including Google, which collected revenue from some discreet advertising attached to the service, Google Book Search. Google also digitized an ever-increasing number of library books that were protected by copyright in order to provide search services that displayed small snippets of the text. In September and October 2005, a group of authors and publishers brought a class action suit against Google, alleging violation of copyright. Last October 28, after lengthy negotiations, the opposing parties announced agreement on a settlement, which is subject to approval by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.^[2]
• The settlement creates an enterprise known as the Book Rights Registry to represent the interests of the copyright holders. Google will sell access to a gigantic data bank composed primarily of copyrighted, out-of-print books digitized from the research libraries. Colleges, universities, and other organizations will be able to subscribe by paying for an "institutional license" providing access to the data bank. A "public access license" will make this material available to public libraries, where Google will provide free viewing of the digitized books on one computer terminal. And individuals also will be able to access and print out digitized versions of the books by purchasing a "consumer license" from Google, which will cooperate with the registry for the distribution of all the revenue to copyright holders. Google will retain 37 percent, and the registry will distribute 63 percent among the rightsholders.
• Not only will Google's technological wizardry bring books to readers, it will also open up extraordinary opportunities for research, a whole gamut of possibilities from straightforward word searches to complex text mining. Under certain conditions, the participating libraries will be able to use the digitized copies of their books to create replacements for books that have been damaged or lost. Google will engineer the texts in ways to help readers with disabilities.
• the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.
• While the public authorities slept, Google took the initiative.

8 more annotations...

• Moreover, Google is required to provide the familiar "find it in a library" link for all books offered commercially as a result of the settlement. That is, if after reading 20 percent of a book a user wants more and finds the price of online access to be excessive, the reader will be shown a list of libraries (ordered by proximity) that have the book, and can visit one of those libraries or employ interlibrary loan. This greatly weakens the market power of Google's product. Indeed, it is much better than the current state of affairs, in which users of Google Book Search can read only snippets, not 20 percent of a book, when deciding whether they have found what they seek.

• The settlement is far from perfect. The American practice of making public policy by private lawsuit is very far from perfect. But in the absence of the settlement—even if Google had prevailed against the suits by the publishers and authors—we would not have the digitized infrastructure to support the twenty-first-century Republic of Letters. We would have indexes and snippets and no way to read online any substantial amount of any of the millions of works at stake. The settlement gives us free preview of an enormous amount of content, and the promise of easy access to the rest, thereby greatly advancing the public good.

   

  Of course I would prefer the universal library, but I am pretty happy about the universal bookstore. After all, bookstores are fine places to read books, and then to decide whether to buy them or go to the library to read some more.
• Until authors secured their own copyright, their fate was in the hands of benevolent or not so benevolent institutions—the church, the aristocracy, the university, the ruling party, the printing house. Autonomous copyright allows authors to benefit directly from their creative labor; it also removes powerful instruments of censorship, and it makes readers, as opposed to political agencies, the nourishers of the work they value.

1 more annotation...

• It appears that Google is striving to become the main dispenser of algorithmic power over digital books. By monopolizing much of the computational potential of such books, Google is positioning itself as the operating system of the digital document world. Digital texts already dominate some areas of knowledge. To give a single company such a grip on the collective memory of the world, its analysis, and even its meaning is frightening to say the least.
• Libraries can have a very important part in promoting these projects and enforcing the standards that must accompany them. In so doing, they would be acting as institutional citizens of the digital document age, and not as grateful (and somewhat passive) consumers of Google's apparent largesse.

• I did not intend to contest the value of Google Book Search but merely to point out that digitized books have a long way to go before they can match the quality of a printed text. There is no denying that digitization can do wonders. It has revealed aspects of Beowulf, including lost vocabulary, which escaped observation by the naked eye. The most obvious advantage of digitization is its ability to make large numbers of books available and searchable. In trying to illustrate that point, I cited the example of the Electronic Enlightenment, a project I initiated at the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford many years ago. The idea was to create a database from the published correspondence of four eighteenth-century philosophers and statesmen, Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, and Jefferson. They wrote so many letters to so many people that a digitized record of all their exchanges would make it possible to trace references through an enormous, transatlantic epistolary network and to show how the Republic of Letters actually functioned as a communication system.

• What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?
• News in the information age has broken loose from its conventional moorings, creating possibilities of misinformation on a global scale. We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we?