Looking in Google’s Direction, Presenters at BLC Digitization Summit Speak Up for Public Domain

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 10/5/2008

• Concern expressed over commercial scanning efforts
• Need to find "right roles"
• BLC announces new digitization initiatives

(This originally appeared in the Oct. 2, 2008 issue of the LJ Academic Newswire.)

At a summit in Boston, academic librarians, administrators, and public interest advocates challenged their peers to embrace digitization policies that turn back “the erosion of the public’s rights.” The Universal Access Digital Library Summit, held on September 24 and 25 at the Boston Public Library (BPL), hosted a range of leaders voicing concerns about programs—specifically, Google’s library scan plan—that place “restrictions on use of public domain works that are being scanned for commercial purposes from library collections.” The event was organized by the Boston Library Consortium, Inc. (BLC) an association of 20 academic and research libraries located in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

At the two-day event, speakers contrasted two major digitization projects: Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive and its Open Content Alliance, which has digitized 500,000 works from library collections across North America, making them universally available, with Google Book Search, which has digitized over a million items, but makes them available only through the Google search engine. Critics, most notably, Kahle, have criticized libraries for entering into agreements with Google that allow for perpetual restrictions on public domain books.

“The idea of making all books accessible online in new and different ways is all good news,” Kahle told LJ in an interview last year. “But if you do this in a way that the materials that have been housed in libraries for centuries are made available only through one corporate interface, that is an Orwellian future.”

A challenge

In a white paper commissioned for the summit, Rick Johnson, a senior advisor to the Association of Research Libraries and the first executive director of SPARC, challenged libraries to devise “new funding strategies, coordinate their action, and adopt forward-looking principles” to guide their digitization efforts. “It’s time to sort out the right roles and responsibilities for companies, libraries, governments, and private funders,” Johnson writes in the paper, Free Our Libraries! Why We Need a New Approach To Putting Library Collections Online, “and to get about the work of building an Internet public library that puts the public first.”

The impressive list of speakers at the event included Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), who transmitted his remarks in a video recording from Washington; Maura Marx, executive director of the newly formed Open Knowledge Commons; Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the University Library, Harvard University; Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor media studies and law, University of Virginia; as well as representatives from the Internet Archive, the Google Book Project, HarperCollins, Oxford University Press, Science Commons, Columbia University, American University, NASULGC, and the Berkeley Electronic Press. 

Library leaders in the Boston area have been some of the nation’s most aggressive proponents of digitization strategies to maximize public benefit: BPL has been a forceful proponent of the OCA, and Harvard University recently instituted a sweeping open access mandate for its faculties of Arts and Sciences and its Law School. The BLC, meanwhile, last year became the first large-scale library consortium to self-fund digitization of its members’ collections.

Attainable goals

In addition to its ardent stance on keeping public domain materials open, BLC libraries are putting their money behind their efforts. At the summit, BLC announced that it has pledged an additional $1 million to its digitization project, bringing total BLC funding to $2 million since it began in 2007. And two BLC members, the State Library of Massachusetts and the University of Massachusetts, Boston’s Healy Library, announced a partnership to scan and electronically preserve 250,000 pages of Massachusetts state laws from 1620 to the present. Materials from both projects will be scanned by the Internet Archive at the Boston Public Library under the Open Content Alliance Principles. 

Despite the exit last year of deep-pocketed Microsoft, an initial OCA supporter, BLC officials noted that library-based scanning efforts committed to making public domain materials as widely accessible as possible were both affordable and essential.  “What was once seemingly impossible is now attainable, given today’s technologies,” said Brinley Franklin, vice provost, University of Connecticut Libraries, and president, Boston Library Consortium. Franklin said the BLC and its partners are committed to seeing the “world’s knowledge accessible to everyone, unrestricted by choice of technology, geographic location, or socio-economic status.”

Barbara Preece, BLC executive director, told the LJ Academic Newswire that the consortium was in discussion with the Sloan Foundation about its next steps. “This event, focused upon the higher administration of the BLC institutions, was meant to raise consciousness, but, definitely, we want to come up with some concrete steps to take place next.”  

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