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

The movie opens with a shot of a 1950s computer, something on the order of a six-burner Viking stove mated with a teletype machine. The machine spits out the credits: The Desk Set, it prints, on that quaint fanfold paper with the holes on the sides.

The plot unfolds quickly: Katharine Hepburn heads the research department of a TV network —a department of glamorously brilliant career girls who can tell you in a flash not just whether the king of the Watusi drives a car, but what kind. One day a mysterious stranger—Spencer Tracy—materializes with a hush-hush mission. As he blunders eccentrically around the department with his tape measure and trick questions, the gals soon discover that he’s the holder of a “Ph.D. in science” from MIT who’s invented some gigantic new computer. Joan Blondell, Hepburn’s salty sidekick, is practically hysterical: “He’s trying to replace us all with a mechanical brain,” she exclaims. “That means the end of us!”

Today there are millions of computers in America, many of them in libraries, yet these institutions and others still employ more than 200,000 people calling themselves “librarians,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s about twice the number as in 1957, when Desk Set was released. It seems unlikely that any mechanical—or electronic—brain will mean the end of these librarians any time soon.

But the libraries they work in are something else again. The dawning of the digital age, glimpsed so charmingly in Desk Set, is bringing radical change to the whole notion of the library, with vast implications for the price, availability and durability of knowledge.

The dawn of the digital age, in fact, offers opportunities as well as challenges for libraries and their users unlike any seen since the random-access knowledge modules familiarly known as “books” supplanted scrolls.

What libraries may be like in the future is important not just for librarians and authors, but for anyone who cares about access to knowledge and information. To the extent an informed citizenry sustains a free society, democracy itself might be said to rest at least partly on the edifice of the library.

But it’s not at all clear that the library of tomorrow will even involve an edifice. Digital technology raises questions about the very nature of the library—about what it’s for, how it functions, what should be in it, and whether it’s a place or an idea. What does it mean to lend a book when the volume exists only electronically? How many comprehensive research libraries are necessary if and when collections are largely digitized—and therefore accessible anywhere? Will digital libraries make it easier for the world’s poor to affordably tap knowledge? Or, without electricity or reliable telecommunications networks, will Third World countries only fall farther behind nations already rich in information?

Andrew Carnegie understood how well libraries could function as the launching pads of social mobility, which is why, in 1881, he started using his wealth to fund them. In those days there were few free public libraries, and working people had relatively limited access to reading material. Carnegie helped to change that. His money subsequently built 2,509 public libraries all over the English-speaking world. To this day, there are Carnegie libraries in cities and towns across America, as well as in the British Isles and Australia.

Digital Libraries
in the Third World
The challenge today is using digital technology to bring the library’s riches to the world’s poor. In this context, Carnegie Corporation, for example, is bringing digital technology to bear in programs to improve African libraries and universities. Public libraries in Botswana, Kenya and South Africa are getting computers and help in digitizing their catalogs as well as connecting to larger library networks electronically. Corporation program officer Rookaya Bawa, who directs the foundation’s efforts in this area*, says progress is constrained by a lack of affordable bandwidth. African telecommunications services are inadequate and expensive, and new fiber optic lines would require enormous capital. She remains optimistic, but admits that in Africa, “the wires are so crossed on this issue, it’s unbelievable.”

One thing Third World library users have in their favor is rapid advances in digitizing technology. Even the best digital library, after all, can’t do anything about the millions of pages of items that exist today only on paper. But those items too may soon find their way online. In a neat symbiosis, books and other works on paper are sometimes shipped to countries such as India, where they can be manually scanned at lower cost than in the U. S. In another example of symbiosis, the digital revolution is speeding up the scanning process through automation. The Stanford University library, for example, has started digitizing paper materials using a robot that can scan books and newspapers at speeds exceeding 1,000 pages per hour. Michael Keller, Stanford’s head librarian, can see the possibilities. As he told The New York Times, “Think about the power of bringing our library to little schools in the middle of Africa,”

For Third World patrons who do have access to the Internet, digital libraries are already starting to deliver materials that local libraries couldn’t previously get or afford. The African Digital Library offers more than 8,000 full-text books online to patrons who live on the African continent. The latest research—in the form of agricultural, medical and scientific papers—from the world’s advanced industrial economies is also starting to reach the Third World electronically via such efforts as Hinari (www.healthinternetwork.org), which makes medical publications available to underdeveloped countries at radically reduced cost, and the eJournals Delivery Service (www.ejds.org). SPARC—the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition—is working to exploit the economies created by the Internet to lower the cost of academic journals for everyone by promoting competition in the field.
Some efforts are focused on overcoming the bandwidth constraint.

The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library (http://teeal.cornell.edu/) is distributed annually on CD-ROM to poor countries at low cost; it consists of more than 140 agriculturally oriented journals. And the eIFL initiative (www.eifl.net), started by the Open Society Institute, provides academic journals to poor countries, also on CD-ROM.

The experience in some underdeveloped countries suggests the physical library is a long way from disappearing. In Colombia, for example, the Bogotá public libraries were networked as part of a revitalization project that included improving existing libraries and building new ones. Library use doubled from 2000 to 2002, and the project won the 2002 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Access to Learning Award —a $1 million grant.

Electronic Library Books
If you want a glimpse at the library of tomorrow, look no further than NetLibrary. Originally a private company with venture capital funding, it filed for Chapter 11 as part of the dot.com bust and was acquired by the Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit consortium of libraries that provides various services to its members.

What NetLibrary does is provide a rich collection of more than 51,000 electronic books, most of them academic, to libraries. To allay publisher fears about cannibalizing sales of physical copies, NetLibrary takes a “one book, one user” approach. It sells libraries an actual electronic copy of a work, and when one user is viewing it, no one else can. Prices are about the same as hardcovers—plus a hefty fee to cover NetLibrary’s costs in running the system, including the Internet servers that host the electronic books.

Electronic books at hardcover prices might not seem appealing at first. But NetLibrary has signed up a remarkable 8,200 libraries all over the world, including the African Digital Library, and its growing collection, assembled by professional librarians, is starting to include consumer titles as well. NetLibrary vice president Marge Gammon says most of its titles get used for only 15 or 20 minutes at a time, so they’re usually available—often via regional networks of libraries that can share the costs. That can make a NetLibrary e-book cheaper than multiple copies of regular books, yet more convenient than a single copy that needs to be shuttled around among member institutions.

You can’t take one of NetLibrary’s books into the bathtub, of course, and reading on screen can be tedious. But cardholders can access e-books from anywhere, they don’t take up any shelf space and they can’t be stolen, as library books so often are. Plus, users can perform full-text searches—and even write in the books, so to speak, with annotation, highlighting and other tools. Your scribblings are saved to your account and don’t affect how the book looks to anyone else.

Next page: “Think about the power of bringing our library to little schools
in the middle of Africa.”—Michael Keller, University Librarian, Stanford University

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* The Corporation’s support of library initiatives is currently focused on revitalizing selected African libraries. The goals of this program are to develop national libraries, revitalize selected public libraries and consolidate the development of university libraries in countries and institutions that have strategic intervention programs funded by the foundation. See sidebar, A Short History of Carnegie Corporation’s Library Program.