Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 3 | The Digital Library: Its Future Has Arrived, page 2

NetLibrary is also an example of how the digital revolution is blowing down library walls, since you can use it from home any time you want. The same goes for Ebrary, a private company that charges libraries a fee (based on number of cardholders) to permit their users to access books and other materials—except Ebrary’s approach is all-you-can eat, so multiple users can view the same document. Publishers get a royalty on the deal.

A company called Questia is going even further by selling the library direct to patrons much the same way subscription libraries sold access to reading materials in the 19th century. Students who pony up $20 a month (or $120 a year) get electronic access via Questia to more than 45,000 complete books from such sterling names as Yale University Press and W.W. Norton. The books, along with something like 25,000 articles, are chosen by professional librarians, and publishers receive royalties. As with NetLibrary, users get online research tools. Nothing is ever checked out when you want it, and of course, the place never closes.

The Amazon Library
Steve Coffman is a reference librarian by profession, but a bomb thrower by nature. Nowadays he’s vice president for product development at LSSI, a library services company. Coffman outraged some librarians by suggesting in a provocative essay that Amazon.com could be a model for the library of the future. “It’s incredible what they’ve done,” he says.

Coffman easily ticks off the many ways Amazon is superior to libraries: it has a larger collection, amazing economic efficiencies and an astonishing catalog that has itself become “a major reference tool,” one that puts traditional library catalogs to shame. At Amazon, readers almost always find what they want and get it delivered to their door, often with no shipping charges. Compare this to libraries, where visitors often can’t find what they want, and if they are among the rare patrons that make use of the inter-library loan system—sometimes at a small fee—getting that book to them might cost the library $25 or $30, as much or more than simply ordering it from Amazon.

That doesn’t mean libraries ought to shut their doors. On the contrary, says Coffman, “We’ve got everything we need to beat the pants off Amazon. But nobody’s done it.”

Coffman is trying. For a fee, for example, his company will provide your library with a virtual reference desk, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. LSSI staffs this service with librarians logged onto the Internet from all over America. The catch is that if a patron from, say, Denver calls, then the LSSI librarian will only consult resources available to Denver library patrons (in addition, of course, to the Internet). “It’s silly,” Coffman acknowledges. “But publishers care.”

Coffman thinks libraries could learn a lot from Barnes & Noble as well as Amazon, not to mention high-tech companies that make use of global operations to exploit differing time zones. He foresees a time when the electronic reference desk goes global; then people in Third World countries could get answers from Western reference librarians, but U.S. libraries could also staff their reference desks around the clock with English-speaking librarians in places like India.

If Amazon is the library of the future, for many users the Internet is the library of today. But digital access to information changes the way we use it, privileging what is recent, searchable and at hand over what might be far more valuable or reliable, if less convenient. Still, the avalanche of random information available on the Internet is only going to grow. How should we deal with this explosion of both access and information? Bringing the library to the Internet will probably be a more effective remedy than hoping to bring users to the library.

An important function of libraries is preserving knowledge as well as disseminating it, so if the Internet is the library, maybe it too needs preservation. To address this problem, Brewster Kahle, a pioneer in digital information technologies, has created The Internet Archive (at www.archive.org) featuring a “wayback machine,” which “makes it possible to surf more than 10 billion pages stored in the Internet Archive’s web archive.” Here you can see differing versions of a web page—even your own—that you thought were long dead and buried.

“The idea,” Kahle has said, “is to build a library of everything, and the opportunity is to build a great library that offers universal access to all of human knowledge. That may sound laughable, but I’d suggest that the Internet is going exactly in that direction.”

Libraries could go that way as well, as least theoretically. Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, information scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have pointed out that most data is already created and stored electronically, and digital data is growing faster than any other kind. The professors estimate that “the world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage,” which isn’t much given that the cost of hard drives can be $1 per gigabyte or less. The digital form of this material, coupled with rapid advancements in its distribution, leads to a conclusion not unlike Kahle’s. As Lyman and Varian put it, “Soon it will be technologically possible for an average person to access virtually all recorded information.”

So digital libraries can theoretically save everything. All the more ironic, then, that in the long run they may not be able to save anything at all.

Next page: “The idea is to build a library of everything... a great library that offers universal access to all of human knowledge.”—Brewster Kahle

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