Can the nonprofit world create a national digital library to put America’s collective intellectual wealth within everyone’s reach? Robert Darnton, the historian who directs the Harvard University Library, has been one of the most public champions of the idea.
This past weekend, Mr. Darnton convened a group of 42 top-level representatives from foundations, cultural institutions, and the library and scholarly worlds to talk about how to build that library. In a short statement, the group endorsed the idea of “a Digital Public Library of America,” envisioning it as “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources” drawn from the country’s libraries, archives, museums, and universities.
The Chronicle tallked with Mr. Darnton about the discussions and what will happen next. Surprisingly, the biggest obstacle to the Digital Public Library, in his view, is not money but “finding our way through our baroque copyright laws,” especially those that govern so-called orphan works, whose copyright status is unclear.
Q. Who attended?
A. People were banging on the door, and everyone I invited said yes. …The turnout from foundations was wonderful, and that’s important because one idea is to create a coalition of foundations who would fund this. If you got enough foundations committed to it, you can finance it. [Note: Mr. Darnton said representatives from several research institutions and from major cultural institutions also took part, but he had promised not to make their names public yet. Several senior scholars, including law professors well versed in copyright law, also sat in.]
Q. What was the tenor of the meeting?
A. I’m biased, but I think it was a huge success. Everyone I talked to told me that they were delighted and determined to move on to the next steps and committed to the cause. One of the things that I found especially heartening about it was the fact that everyone checked their egos at the door. The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people would feel that it’s their property, so to speak. But I did not detect any proprietary sensitivity among the group. The discussion was open and frank, and I believe it arrived at a consensus.
Q. What was the consensus?
A. The agreement was very solid about the desirability of this thing, and then there was discussion about what “this” was. In general, I think it fair to say, everyone thought the library should be one for the American people, by which I mean not an exclusive research library but a grand collection of books that could be used in junior colleges and high schools and institutions of every sort throughout the country. …It simply is not true that everything is now on the Internet, but it is true that the digital resources available through the Internet have enormous potential for education and even for self-empowerment of individuals. So I imagine people in remote locations, armed with a computer or perhaps computerless, but with access to a small public library, being able to consult a collection as great as or greater than the 30 million books in the Library of Congress.
One of the first things we discussed was the financial problem. It didn’t take long for people there to arrive at a conclusion, which is: We can do it. Everyone seemed convinced that this is certainly within the scope of a funding campaign by foundations. There were different estimates as to the total cost, and of course those estimates depend on the size and scale of what we have in mind, but everyone agreed we could do this. [Here Mr. Darnton pointed to studies that Harvard has done of digital-library projects in other countries, including the Netherlands and Norway.] So we have a lot of information about costs.
Q. Was Google a focus of the conversation?
A. This was not in the slightest an anti-Google or counter-Google project. Google was hardly mentioned. One institution or entity that has resulted from Google Book Search is the Hathi Trust. …Hathi was mentioned, and my own hope is that the Hathi Trust could somehow evolve to become a fundamental building block of a future digital library. And that would, I think, require the agreement of Google. So although we weren’t really proposing in the slightest an alternate to Google, my own hope is that Google would be persuaded to turn over its digital files of books in the public domain to a future national digital library. Will it? I don’t know. But that would be a great service to the country, and I don’t see how it would damage Google’s interests in the slightest.
Q. What happens now?
A. We want to create a coalition of foundations to fund it. …A second step is to bring together leaders of cultural institutions to mobilize support in Washington. …We expect to have a follow-up conference in the spring.
It’s not as if we are just issuing high-minded manifestos. We are taking concrete steps at the organizational level.
9 Responses to One Step Closer to a National Digital Library
d_fevens - October 6, 2010 at 7:02 pm
In the end I doubt that us gnats will have the opportunity to oppose the digitization of our work before it goes online. Will this be a property grab to rival Google’s? If you do not respect the copyrights of others your work is tainted and no amount of propaganda will change that.Douglas Fevens,Halifax, Nova ScotiaThe University of Wisconsin, Google, & Me
jabberwocky12 - October 7, 2010 at 7:12 am
I think this is a great idea, but I just have one question: “I think it fair to say, everyone thought the library should be one for the American people” to be used by “institutions of every sort throughout the country.” Does this mean that access to the library will be for Americans only? And, if so, how is this to be policed?
jimrettig - October 7, 2010 at 9:44 am
“Surprisingly, the biggest obstacle to the Digital Public Library, in his view, is not money but ‘finding our way through our baroque copyright laws,’ especially those that govern so-called orphan works, whose copyright status is unclear.” Dr. Darton is very polite when he calls our broken copyright laws baroque. At present copyright’s imbalance serves the second part of the U.S. Constitution’s clause giving Congress authority in this area to the detriment of the first part of that clause–much to the detriment of “the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”There is nothing at all surprising about that copyrightis the biggest obstacle. We await a ruling by a federal court in a high stakes lawsuit that the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publisher filed against Google in 2005. Copyright issues are at the heart of the dispute.The copyright status of orphaned works is clear, at least in the U.S.–their rights are protected by current copyright law. What is not clear about these works is how to contact the rights owner to seek permissions to use the works. Hence the “orphaned” appellation.Several years ago I was able to locate and communicate with the current owner of the rights to an ostenible orphaned work, a book which was copyrighted by its author, since deceased. Thanks to biographical databases I was able to identify his son’s name and details about the author’s career. That gave me clues to share with reference librarians at institutions on the other side of the continent who, after several referrals, were able to direct me to the author’s son. I was then able to communicate with him so that he and the faculty member who wanted to use a passage from his father’s book–a passge of a length that would probably fall outside of fair use guidelines–could come to agreement. (No longer a reference librarian by tiitle, I will nevertheless always be one at heart; my fellow reference librarians have never failed me when I have turned to them for help!)It shouldn’t be this complicated! The US Congress several years ago had before it a good bill that would have addressed the orphaned works problem and honored both parts of the “copyright” clause of the U.S. Constitution: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” One house of Congress passed it, the other was derelict in its duty and did nothing.The obstacle remains.
jenhoward - October 7, 2010 at 10:59 am
jabberwocky12: Thanks for the comment. The contents of the proposed library would be drawn from American collections but there are no plans to limit access to Americans only. I think that’s the model that existing national libraries already use.jimrettig: Thanks for sharing that example of how complicated copyright can be–fascinating. “Surprisingly” was my choice of words, not Mr. Darnton’s, so don’t hold that against him. Given the scale of what they’re discussing, I was struck that the people at the conference felt that money would not be the biggest hurdle, even at this early stage.
janawoo - October 7, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Was Brewster Kahle or someone representing the Internet Archive in attendance?
wmartin46 - October 7, 2010 at 4:01 pm
It’s a little amazing that such an idea is so long in the coming. Of course, Google, and the Internet Archive have gone a long way towards getting on the way to 1st base, but there is such a long way to go. One would think that the Library of Congress (LoC) would be the natural “owner”, but having watched some of the videos on the LoC web-site dealing with “digital issues” .. maybe they are not the best “owner” after all. There are so many design issues, that it’s possible that no one organization will ever be able to do all the design/implementation, making this a multi-decade collaboration.I am a big Google/Books user. I love their contribution to people needing access to the literature of the past, but they are not building a “virtual library”, at least not one that is looking very far into the future. There is no “human interest” in the way Google current presents its collections. In previous postings, numerous people have pointed out that Google does not do “collections” or “sets” very well–if at all. This is one of the things that people expect in a p-Library. Google seems to be dismissive of this need. A “virtual library” would want to absorb all of the good ideas from the p-Libraries, and then augment/evolve them in “cyber space”.Kahle has claimed that he is scanning for $30 a book. Unfortunately, the IA OCR is very wanting. Google’s is coming along nicely, but there are many problems still, such as how to deal with English charters pre-1800, as well as all of the languages that one might find in the footnotes of (typically) academic literature. Given that this becomes a problem when downloading to an e-book reader, resolving some of these issues does not seem to be something that will be done quickly.The US Public Library System is consuming about $12B a year. God only knows how much is being consumed in the private libraries of the US. No matter what the total might be, it would seem that diverting some of this money (maybe $100M a year) to a National Digital Library would not impact any of the traditional libraries, and would provide more than enough money to get this project “on the road”.
ladyshrew - October 7, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Was the Library of Congress involved in this in any way? Seems natural, considering their National Digital Library Program.
mollyak - October 12, 2010 at 11:04 am
Paul Courant, who was present at the meeting and is Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, expands a bit on some of these ideas, in particular the copyright issue, on his blog today.
http://paulcourant.net/2010/10/12/a-national-digital-library/
sand6432 - October 21, 2010 at 11:23 am
One would hope that there was some historical memory among the participants and that some reference was made to the earlier discussion of a National Periodicals Center and how that idea evolved over the period 1973-1980 and what lessons were learned: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a904359240~frm=titlelink. The value of the HathiTrust as model lies in its making available the riches of the participating libraries’ special collections, which are not otherwise accessible and are not duplicated in other online resources like the Internet Archive. A National Digital Library that concentrated first on these kinds of materials, rather than just reproducing better quality versions of what IA and Google already provide, would be heading in the right direction. An example of such priceless resources is the effort now under way to make the Dead Sea Scrolls available online for the first time. That kind of resource, of course, is not constrained by copyright in any way. As for orphan works, the interested parties have already proposed a good bill to Congress, as noted; the only obstacle now is Congressional inaction, not any significant opposition to the bill. — Sandy Thatcher