universities

If there is one good outcome from the wreckage of the Google’s effort to digitize the world’s books, it is the push that it gave to librarians like Robert Darnton to find a better way.  Google had wanted to build a search service for an enormous number of books, and it went to the trouble of digitizing more than 30 millions of them into a vast database. 

The only problem is that the whole enterprise was something of a betrayal of the public domain.  The world’s leading university research libraries were providing millions of books for free to Google, which was then planning to sell search subscriptions to these libraries to access the very same books via the Internet. Google also planned to sell the books at whatever prices it wished to set. One can easily imagine a new giant monopoly with a hammerlock on the digitized knowledge of the past century and beyond.

A number of parties, including Robert Darnton, the University Librarian at Harvard, opposed the Google Books project for locking up knowledge on terms set by Google, rather than allowing it to flow freely, without restriction, as is customary in scholarly commons.  The Google digital library project was essentially scuttled in March 2011 when a federal court struck down a settlement that had been negotiated among authors, publishers, Google and others.  The court held that it contained too many unlawful, unacceptable provisions. 

The good news is that some of the leading research universities in the US have risen to the challenge of creating a better, more accessible knowledge commons.  On April 18, the Digital Public Library of America will be launched as a way to make the holdings of US libraries, museums and archives freely accessible to anyone via the Internet.  The project represents a grand coalition of collaboration among leading university libraries, foundations and scholars.  DPLA describes itself as “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives and museums in order to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”  Darnton explains the planning, rationale and future of the DPLA in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.