Pressing for a public online library

MIGUEL HELFT
International Herald Tribune
04-05-2011
Pressing for a public online library
Byline: MIGUEL HELFT
Type: News

With 15 million books scanned, Google had gotten closer to the elusive goal than anyone else.

Is the tantalizing dream of a universal library dead?
Some scholars and librarians across the United States fear it may be, now that a U.S. judge has derailed Google's bold plan to build the world's largest digital library and bookstore. With 15 million books scanned, Google had gotten closer to the elusive goal than anyone else.

"It is quite disappointing because there isn't something better in the wings," said Michael Keller, the university librarian at Stanford in California, one of the first major universities that allowed Google to scan its collections.

But others, who were troubled by Google's plan, have hailed the ruling. They see it as an opportunity to bring new urgency to a project to create a universal public library -- one that, they say, would be far superior to Google's because it would be noncommercial. The project's ambitious mission, recently laid out in a four-page memo, is to "make the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity available, free of charge, to all."

"People feel energized," said Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library. "This is an opportunity for those of us who care about creating a noncommercial public digital library and get on with it."

The lofty effort, the Digital Public Library of America, counts a long list of heavyweights among its supporters, including librarians from major universities and officials from the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

But the endeavor remains in its infancy. The group has many champions, but it has no formal structure other than a "steering committee." It has six working groups to study the project's scope, financing, governance, legal hurdles, technical considerations and audience.

"Everyone who is at the table has a different idea of audience, scope, content and governance," said David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, who supports the project and attended the October meeting. "All those issues need to be worked through."

The project is playing catch-up not only to Google, but also to Europe, where several countries have moved forward with large-scale digitization projects. The European Commission has backed Europeana, a site where users can search for digital copies of art, books, music and video held by the cultural institutions of member countries and which includes about 15 million items.

Europeana is serving as something of a model for the U.S. project. U.S. institutions like the Library of Congress, public and private universities and nonprofit groups like the Internet Archive have already scanned millions of books and hundreds of millions of documents.

The challenge now is not only to continue and expand various digitization projects but also to unify them in a single, searchable electronic portal. But unlike in Europe, where national libraries are usually centralized and backed by governments, the United States has a disparate network of independent institutions that have different missions and serve different populations.

These challenges put in sharp relief the main difference between the digital public library and Google's project: speed.

In eight years, Google has digitized 15 million books.

The company's original idea was to make books searchable online but to show only snippets of books protected by copyright. After groups representing authors and publishers sued Google for copyright infringement in 2005, Google, along with the authors and publishers, saw an opportunity to embark on a far more ambitious project -- a universal digital library and bookstore. Plans for it were laid out in a sweeping settlement that the parties announced in 2008.

Under the settlement, every public library in the United States would have been able to offer its patrons free access to the full texts of the entire collection from computer terminals. Google would have been allowed to sell access to individual books and the entire collection in various ways, sharing proceeds with authors and publishers.

For those who believed in expanding access to the world's cultural heritage, there was plenty to like.

"You have to give Google a lot of credit," said Doron Weber, program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, an early financial backer of the Digital Public Library of America. "Google got everyone's attention."

But the settlement was shot down in U.S. court last month, in part because it turned copyright law on its head, giving Google the right to exploit a book unless its author or publisher objected.

The digital public library project will face the same thorny problem.

"I think the biggest obstacle is copyright," said Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who opposed the Google settlement and is working on legal issues facing the digital public library.

Copyright International Herald Tribune Apr 05, 2011