The new information landscape of the twenty-first century is emerging in a form very different from that of the nineteenth and twentieth century libraries that have formed both the repositories for scholarly knowledge resources and the acquisition systems that have enabled this well-established architecture of learning to function in a manner useful to both academia and the public. For one thing, the idea of an architecture of libraries has been transformed into an architecture of cyberspace systems. The architecture is of course electronic now and seems likely to flourish in future on that basis. Major questions now preoccupy society: what is the future of books themselves? And also of publishers, and how will authors, and their rights, come to be redefined?
Google of course, over the last four years or so, grasped the nettle. They digitised literally millions of books, many of which are covered by existing copyrights. Following protracted negotiations, authors and publishers together obliged Google to agree on a settlement of great complexity, which at least the authors and publishers perceived to reflect the original ideals of the eighteenth century ideal of a Republic of Letters. The word was of course written by hand or printed, but there were no barriers to transferring meaning and the Enlightenment prospered. This was however only relevant to the better-heeled in society. Privilege was endemic in facilitating access.
Copyright today extends to the lifespan of the author plus seventy years. It has grown incrementally ever since 1710 when a Statute of Queen Anne of Great Britain granted fourteen years. In the nineteenth century academe took over. Professionalising learning via the university departments and spawning or consuming learned and professional journals. Since the contributions by academics became largely gratis, the publishers soon reaped a whirlwind, and could foster growing subscription levels through librarian repayment mechanisms. Here Google sees a resource of ’content’ permanently available for reproduction. Latterly the idea of the 'institutional licence' has been developed to legitimise the process of access, with a given percentage being split, with 37% to Google and 63% to the rights-holders. This June Google will, so to say, make accessible to ordinary readers copyright texts taken from many of the world’s most famous libraries and will distribute all revenues via the agency of a book rights’ registry. As an author you are automatically subservient to this agreement unless you have specifically opted out.
The fact is that copyright policy internationally has virtually collapsed and the so-called information society is a free-range mining field for commercial exploitation. It is not apparent that any major political party has noticed the risks, nor provided an agenda for remedying the threat to the foundations of the knowledge-based society.
What then can be the future of libraries themselves? In Britain, the recession has seen different policies applied for civic or local libraries, in different parts of the country. By six weeks from now, Wirral’s Labour/Liberal Democrat council will have closed 11 of its 24 libraries. In order to save £100,000 Swindon will close four libraries unless the decision is rescinded at the eleventh hour. Across the country (England), 82 libraries have already closed since 2003.The situation is dire and unlikely to improve now.
In the museum world, accessibility to major works has taken a dramatic and positive sea change. The creation of the Europeana project by the European Union sprang from a fear amongst European leaders and their cultural advisers that Google itself would in future dominate the World Wide Web, with the Book Search project scanning millions of books taken from world libraries. Europeana, as it is called, is intended to operate on a higher level than mere search engines, offering interactive content, both audio and video. Key historical documents will be viewable, such as England’s Magna Carta (1215) and the Rights of Man Declaration (1789). Some 1,000 European national libraries, museums and other institutions such as the British Library, London, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Louvre, Paris, are now participating. The whole venture was in a way precipitated by the perceived European need to protect the culture, seemingly in open risk to appropriation by commercial operators. But whereas Google is advancing, Microsoft finally abandoned its own online library projects after digitising some 750,000 works. Google has indicated, of Europeana, that it hopes to collaborate, and indeed has done so already.
Quite separately UNESCO in Paris has in April launched the World Digital Library (WDL). This is a project first proposed by the Librarian of Congress, Dr James Billington, some four years ago. Here all material will be available free of charge on a website in seven different languages. Seemingly an entirely altruistic venture, it is intended to develop greater understanding between cultures internationally. On the face of it this will be an unrivalled educational facilities and resourcing. The WDL has now over 30 partners. For example, the Middle East participants include the famous (and architecturally outstanding) Bibliotecha Alexandrina, Egypt, as well as the National Library and Archives of Iraq. It seems that with all their ambition to embrace international visual arts the Gulf States, with their mineral wealth resources, have missed a vital pass here to global distinction, although the Qatar Foundation is engaged. At the same time Google and Microsoft are giving sponsorship. Funding for the WDL may become a problem as with other UNESCO projects in the past. Perhaps the world cannot afford to let it down, even in such a low economic period as exists today. Such projects as Europeana and the WDL are by definition long-term. Progress is still dramatic: the Prado in Madrid have last January digitised 14 works of major appeal, and have introduced them online, at resolutions significantly more accurate than normal digital processing can achieve. Google is heavily involved in the Prado exercise, to the extent of applying its technology (as used in Google Earth) to suspend a ‘gigapixel’ gallery for the 14 Prado works which reveals even individual brushstrokes (having a resolution of 14,000 megapixels).
Accordingly, in the world of libraries and museums, things are dramatically on the move. Inevitably progress results in the collaboration of such commercial operators as Google and Microsoft as well as Yahoo and Amazon, with these institutions. Even Nokia World is entering the field, having recently purchased Navteq, the digital mapping group. Whether at the end of the day the author or scholar benefits, or indeed the publisher or university itself, is now the real unresolved challenge to be faced over the next decade. All participants in this free-range mining territory are likely to be mired in a legal quagmire of unforeseen dimensions.
EDITOR
