NEDBIB-RSS: [NEDBIB-L] Playing Catch-Up in a Digital Library Race

er zijn mensen die denken dat hier alles altijd later dan in de usa
gebeurt.

dus is het erg aardig om te lezen - in het zakelijke katern
van de nyt nog wel - dat nederland, de kb voorop, een prominente rol bij
het realiseren van de digitale bibliotheek speelt.

===
January 8,
2011

BY NATASHA SINGER

AMERICA stood at the forefront of the public
library movement in 1731, when Benjamin Franklin [1] founded the Library
Company of Philadelphia [2], our first successful lending library.

Looking back on the project decades later, Franklin wrote in his
autobiography [3] that the growth of lending libraries had played a role
not only in educating but also in democratizing American society.

"These Libraries," he wrote, "have improved the general Conversation
of the Americans, made the common Tradesmen & Farmers as intelligent as
most Gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed to
some degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in
Defence of their Privileges."

Lending libraries may have been the
newfangled democratizing factor of their day. Centuries later, though,
the United States finds itself trailing Europe and Japan [4] in creating
the modern equivalent: a national digital library that would serve as an
electronic repository for the nation's cultural heritage.

In other
words, there's a real digital library divide.

In contrast to the
United States, the National Library of Norway [5] has been a global
early adopter. In 2005, it announced a goal of digitizing its entire
collection; by now it has scanned some 170,000 books, 250,000
newspapers, 610,000 hours of radio broadcasts, 200,000 hours of TV and
500,000 photographs. And, last year, the National Library of the
Netherlands [6] said it planned to scan all Dutch books, newspapers and
periodicals from 1470 onward.

The libraries of the nearly 50 member
states in the Council of Europe, meanwhile, have banded together in a
single search engine, theeuropeanlibrary.org [7]. And the European
Commission [8] has sponsored Europeana [9], a portal for digital copies
of art, music film and books held by the cultural institutions of member
countries. It currently contains scans of about 15 million artifacts.

Until recently, however, many American institutions and academic
centers have concentrated on making scans of their own special
treasures, or collaborating with one another on themed projects, rather
than combining their electronic resources into a single online access
point.

A national digital library is clearly a bigger challenge for
the United States, with its vast and disparate library holdings, than
for European countries with smaller populations and land masses. But the
Library of Congress [10] was already working on the effort in the 1990s
when it created a digital collection called "American Memory"; [11] it
contains scans of 16 million books, maps, movies, manuscripts and pieces
of music.

Even so, the library still has more than 100 million other
artifacts that are not yet scanned, says James H. Billington [12], the
librarian of Congress. And even though the American Memory project also
carries the name "national digital library," it is not formally
connected, for example, to many of the country's public libraries.

"There's tremendous local activity and national collaboration around
specific topics," says David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United
States [13]. "But there has been no national coordination of all the
wonderful disparate projects around the country."

Some of those
individual efforts, however, are now beginning to dovetail.

Last
month, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard [14] said it
would coordinate a planning program [15] for public and private groups
interested in creating a "digital public library of America."

The
idea, says Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University
Library and one of the project's originators [16], is to link the
electronic resources of participating university libraries and cultural
institutions like the Library of Congress [17] and make them accessible
through a single portal. The hope is to create "a gigantic digital
library that would make the cultural heritage of the country available
to everyone," he says.

The project would also widen the audience for
the kind of historical out-of-print books, manuscripts, letters, images,
films and audio clips that have typically been the province of scholars.

Of course, practical matters -- like cost, copyright issues and
technology -- would need to be resolved first.

"The crucial question
in many ways is, 'How do you find a common technical infrastructure that
yields interoperability for the scholar, the casual inquirer or the K-12
student?'" Dr. Billington says.

The idea for an American digital
public library was prompted in part by the work of Google [18]. In 2004,
the company started a digitization project, Google Books, that has since
scanned more than 15 million books. Many of these are out-of-print books
lent by institutions [19] like Harvard, Cornell [20] and the University
of Michigan [21]. "Google came along and woke everyone up and showed the
world what could be done in a short period of time," says Maura Marx, a
fellow at the Berkman Center.

People can read out-of-print items at no
cost on Google Books, if those works are no longer subject to copyright
protection. But if a judge approves a settlement between Google and
copyright holders, subscription fees to access scans of out-of-print
books still covered by copyright will have to be paid by universities
and other institutions.

An American digital public library would serve
as a nonprofit institutional alternative to Google Books, Professor
Darnton says.

"There's a conflict between the raison d'être of Google,
which is to make money for its shareholders," he says, "and libraries
whose goal is to make books available to readers."

But such a digital
public library would have a better chance of success, he says, if it
included out-of-copyright books owned by member libraries that Google
had digitized.

That is already happening in Europe, where the national
libraries of the Netherlands [22] and Austria [23] have signed
agreements with Google in which their sites can host digital copies of
out-of-copyright books in their own holdings that have been scanned by
the company. The libraries also have the right to make those scans
available on public educational sites like Europeana.

A SPOKESWOMAN
for Google says the company would be happy to participate in the
proposed American project.

"Making the world's books accessible online
is something that requires public and private initiatives," says
Annabella Weisl, a Google Book Search [24] executive in Germany, "and so
we welcome new efforts in this direction."

But Jill Cousins, the
executive director of Europeana, says that the great American research
libraries could do much more than simply increase access to scans of
scholarly material.

"What's sort of missing is digitization of the
accessible literature," like the popular novels and biographies readers
seek at brick-and-mortar public libraries, she says. A few institutions,
like the National Library of Norway, are already venturing into this
area, via novel arrangements with copyright holders.

"It would be nice
to conceive of something bigger that has more to do with the public good
than with the academic side of the equation," Ms. Cousins says.

A
version of this article appeared in print on January 9, 2011, on page
BU3 of the New York edition.

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