Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 3 | The Digital Library: Its Future Has Arrived, page 4 (low bandwidth)

Dealing with Copyright
The problem of preservation inevitably leads to the issue of ownership. In the past, libraries owned everything they offered, and preservation was their province. For instance, they kept copies of newspapers on microfilm, which patrons could come and use. But nowadays, people increasingly access back issues of important newspapers such as The New York Times via a proprietary database, the preservation of which is the owner’s business.

Given the value of such a database, we can assume the owner will do a good job, but that depends on copyright, and there is no more contentious issue for libraries—and copyright holders—as both head into a digital future. “For libraries,” writes Carrie Russell, a copyright specialist at the American Library Association, “traditional functions that depend on the ownership and relative permanence of a copy, like library lending, collection development, and preservation have been radically altered by digital technologies.”

Libraries increasingly find themselves renting material rather than owning it. This often requires an ongoing subscription; if the library stops paying, it loses not only new material but everything that has come before as well. Furthermore, this “access” model—versus traditional ownership—means libraries are licensing material under rules set by a private contract rather than federal copyright law. And what happens to the database if its owner goes bankrupt?

The whole concept of a “lending” library is in jeopardy. In the print world, after all, libraries can rely on the “first sale” provision of copyright law to freely lend any work they have purchased. But “first sale” doesn’t apply in the digital world, where theoretically the Library of Congress could buy a single digital “copy” of any book and everyone in the world could “borrow” it simultaneously.

You can’t blame copyright holders for worrying. For many titles, library purchases account for a significant chunk of sales, sometimes even the majority. And the experience of the recording industry, which seems powerless to keep people from downloading music without paying for it, is worrisome to anyone whose livelihood depends on intellectual property. The Internet’s unofficial slogan, after all, is “information wants to be free.” But the corollary is that creators of information want to be paid for it. So publishers and other content owners have been pushing for—and getting—stronger and longer lasting copyright protection from Congress.

Some people even suggest that the current legal and business models for compensating authors and publishers can never be stretched to fit the digital future. One of the most intriguing alternatives has been put forward by David Rothman, a 56-year-old writer in Alexandria, Virginia.

Rothman calls his project TeleRead (www.teleread.org), and it would amount to a single global digital library, except distributed, much like the Internet today. It would start with academic books, out-of-print titles and works that are already in the public domain (many of which in various forms are already finding their way onto the Net) and gradually expand to include all the books published, anywhere.

Copyright problems would vanish. Access would be free via the Internet, after all, so no one would bother making an unauthorized copy. Users could make printouts—sooner or later portable digital tablets will make reading on screen less onerous anyway—or save electronic copies with their own highlights and notes.

So who would pay the writers? Rothman’s idea is that public funds could be allocated to publishers and authors based on the number of times each book is borrowed or accessed—something society could easily afford given book spending of something like $25 billion annually in this country.

Then what would happen to the publishing industry under TeleRead? While it could forget about printing, manufacturing and returns, in Rothman’s vision, a publisher’s brand would become even more important to assure readers of a work’s quality. Publishers would still have to acquire, edit and promote books, and they would get paid for this based on their performance in the marketplace, just as they do now—except nobody would “buy” anything.

Is There Still a
Library in Our Future?
So will all information eventually be in the form of ones and zeros? Will we reach for a computer as casually as we reach for a pair of reading glasses? Will books someday vanish altogether? Yes and no. Paper will be around for a long time to come, and books will persist whether they are printed on paper or not. But make no mistake, the future of libraries—and of information—is digital.

Where does this leave the librarians? “Most people assume the building with the lions out front has a future only as a museum,” says Larry Lannom. “Eventually, it will go away. The skills librarians bring in organizing and making accessible the ongoing cultural record of humanity will probably change, but they will endure.”

Which is exactly what happens in Desk Set. The research department’s new computer, like the specialist brought in to run it, doesn’t know the difference between “curfew” and “Corfu,” which the human researchers find hilarious. When the thing goes completely blooey, Tracy fixes it with one of Hepburn’s hairpins. And when the librarians get pink slips at the end, so does the president of the company. Tracy’s payroll computer, it seems, has gone haywire too. It’s even fired him.

But the movie is too smart for mere Luddism. It turns out the whole idea was to free the librarians from drudgery, which is what the computer does best, so they can focus on real research. The computer, after all, doesn’t know everything—when Tracy asks it whether Hepburn should marry him, it gives the wrong answer.

Finally Hepburn herself puts it to good use, tackling the question “How much does the earth weigh?”

“With or without people?” the computer wants to know.

Daniel Akst is a writer in New York’s Hudson Valley, where, until recently, he was a trustee of the one-room Tivoli Free Library. He is the author of The Webster Chronicle, a novel.

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