New Plan Seeks a 'Big Tent' for a National Digital Library
By Michael Kelley Dec 15, 2010A new effort is under way to create a blueprint for a comprehensive national digital library that will put the country's cultural heritage only a mouse click away.
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research program at Harvard Law School, announced December 13 that it will administer a collaborative effort whose goal is to create an overarching and open governing structure under which ongoing digitization projects, such as the HathiTrust and others, would willingly work.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will provide the funding for the exploratory initiative, which is being billed as the "Digital Public Library of America."
"The idea is to create a big tent where lots of people can work hard toward a public-spirited solution," John Palfrey, the Faculty Co-Director at the Berkman Center and the Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, told LJ. "It's not a competitive effort. It's meant to be complementary to its core."
Palfrey is head of the initiative's 11-member steering committee.
"What this will look like precisely is the work that lies immediately ahead of us," he said. "It's an exciting idea that could mobilize a lot of people with energy, expertise, and commitment to the world of ideas in a digital-plus era."
Workshops planned for 2011
The steering committee will coordinate a series of workshops next year with the goal of building a consensus about legal, technical, financial, governance, and content questions.
David Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, has offered to host a plenary meeting in the early summer of 2011, according to a press release from the Berkman Center.
"I'm more pleased than I can say, and I hope I can contribute something useful," Jerome McGann, a member of the steering committee and John Stewart Bryan University Professor at the University of Virginia, told LJ. "I see this as a remarkable, even an epochal, initiative in public education,"
McGann said Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library and a member of the steering committee, galvanized the effort through his writings in the New York Review of Books. A group of more than 40 people from various public and private institutions attended an exploratory workshop about the project held October 1-2 at the Radcliffe Center in Cambridge.
In a recent article, Darnton wrote about how the United States is lagging behind other countries in national digitization efforts.
"The Dutch are now digitizing every Dutch book, pamphlet, and newspaper produced from 1470 to the present," Darnton wrote. "President [Nicholas] Sarkozy of France announced last November that he would make €750 million available to digitize the nation's cultural 'patrimony.' And the Japanese Diet voted for a two-year, 12.6 billion yen crash program to digitize their entire national library. If the Netherlands, France, and Japan can do it, why can't the United States?"
'A big ocean to boil'
In the case of France, a report from the French Senate's finance committee in March concluded that the effort would most likely require a partnership with Google, despite Sarkozy's unease with that company's role in the digitization of France's cultural assets.
The report said that "with the Bibliotheque Nationale's current resources, it would take about 750 million euros and 375 years to digitize the entire collection [about 15 million books]." With Google, it would probably only require ten years, the report noted.
Palfrey said Google's role is one of the elements the workshops will help define.
"This is not an anti-Google or a pro-Google initiative," Palfrey told LJ. "I could easily see a role for a Google Books-type service as part of a large whole over time. I could also see this idea thriving in the absence of a Google Books-type service.
"Of course, the outcome of the settlement negotiations and approval process in the Google Books case matters a great deal to the world of library. But the work ... will not rise or fall on what Judge Chin, or anyone else involved, decides," he said, referring to Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, who is the supervising judge for the class-action settlement over Google Book Search.
Carl Malamud, President of PublicResource.org and another member of the steering committee, agreed.
"This isn't an either/or thing ... this is a big ocean to boil and we're all part of the same community trying to make it happen," he told LJ.
Malamud and two other members of the steering committee, Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, and Michael A. Keller, Director of Academic Information Resources at Stanford University, work closely with the Google Books team.
"We hope to emerge with a concrete workplan and a governance structure that represents the consensus of the country's libraries, universities, archives, and museums for moving forward together with a shared vision," Doron Weber, vice president of the Sloan Foundation and a member of the steering committee, said in a press release.
Palfrey said the committee would "float the plan broadly and transparently."
The other members of the steering committee are:
Charles Henry, President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)
Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress
Maura Marx, Berkman Center Fellow and Executive Director, Knowledge Commons
Donald Waters, Program Officer for Scholarly Communications and Information Technology at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
"It's a small effort with some great people and if it gains traction we hope it will become bigger," Palfrey said.
Some commentators have questioned whether groups such as this one or the Hathi Trust, which are grounded in academia, have a too narrow focus.
"Let's please remember that the culture-oriented priorities of Prof. Darnton and the institutional priorities of HathiTrust are not right for society at large," David Rothman, the founder of TeleRead, wrote in a recent comment on LJ's Digital Libraries blog by Roy Tennant.
"Especially I'm frustrated over the treatment of public libraries as an afterthought, whether the issue is content or governance," he added.
Palfrey said the work would be coordinated across many institutions, including public libraries.
"Maura Marx was recently at the Boston Public Library (and still works actively with the public library community through her nonprofit)," he said of the steering committee member. "We will certainly welcome further participation from public librarians. The Steering Committee is comprised of initial volunteers who have offered to work on this idea and will no doubt grow and change over time, as well."
