The other day Barrett posed the question Do We Need A World Library? in response to news coverage of the prototype World Digital Library being developed by the Library of Congress, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the National Library of Brazil, the National Library and Archives of Egypt, the National Library of Russia, and the Russian State Library.

Good Points!

Barrett makes some good points, particularly about the problem of information disappearing. The combination of problems -- including the natural loss of the physical information objects (particularly rare ones) and the fact that the problem of digital preservation (particularly for the "born-digital" objects that have no physical instantiation) remains largely unsolved -- creates a situation in which huge losses of information are almost guaranteed. I was at a meeting last year at which a university was acknowledging that it is losing information every day -- it just doesn't know what or how much.

I also like Barrett's point about the existence of technologies to help solve some of the information problems we face today.

And I share Barett's frustration with large scale, top down projects and his implied promotion of smaller scale, innovative projects.

Need for Libraries

But I believe we do need planning and we do need libraries. I don't think the situations we face call for an either/or approach. We don't need to choose big libraries OR small libraries; we don't need to choose small projects OR large projects. We don't even need to choose "libraries" OR "no-libraries" as a solution to information preservation and access. We can choose a both/and approach that makes best use of a variety of tools and techniques, each suited to a particular problem that it can address best.

I don't think that we should exclude any possible solutions or worry about big projects like the World Library. I think we should welcome such projects -- just as libraries should welcome P2P file sharing, user-generated keyword-tagging, and even private sector projects when they facilitate more access to more information. I believe that it is extremely important that libraries and librarians avoid assuming that everything will take care of itself.

Technology helps us reach our goals; we shouldn't let it set our goals

Some librarians take this kind of thinking way too far, I think; (see my post, The Googlization of Everything, "Drop the fight"? or Start a Revolution?). They miss the point that even such revered tools as Google work not because of technology but because of human generated metadata. Technology (e.g., Google's algorithm) provides tools that are only useful if there are raw materials to work with. (Try building a house with hammers and saws and no wood or nails; imagine google if there were no links, i.e., human generated metadata, to which it could apply PageRank.) Technology helps us reach our goals; we shouldn't let it set our goals.

Rather than "dropping the fight" or saying that we don't need a world library, I think librarians should be looking for things to do that will complement what others are doing. For example, we should be looking for ways to apply existing (and forthcoming!) technologies to what we do. We shouldn't give up on authority control (e.g., LCSH) but neither should we overlook the value of user-generated keywords when they provide better, more-precise, more up-to-date access than slow-changing authority records. Rather than hoping that someone (e.g., publishers, distributors, individuals, researchers, volunteers?) will save what needs to be saved, we should be building redundant digital collections and providing selection, organization, preservation, access, and service to those collections. And so forth.

It is commendable that individuals and non-librarians are creating metadata, just as it is commendable than people can design and build their own homes; but that doesn't mean we want a world with no architects and no carpenters and no plumbers. I might be content to live in a self-built dome, but I can still value a skyscraper designed and built by professionals. To use a different analogy, the open-source programming community values professional programmers and version control and source-code monitoring and so forth to guarantee good reliable code. Professionals (be they programmers, or carpenters, or librarians) bring skills and tools that are valuable. And we should not ignore or deprecate those skills and tools; we (librarians) should celebrate them and make sure we (society) do not lose them.

The Web is a tool, not a Library

But, perhaps more importantly, the web is not a Library and never will be. The web is a tool libraries can use for what they do -- just as scholars and readers and publishers and artists can use it for what they do. Libraries are defined by what they do -- not how they do it. Libraries should use the best tools available to do what they do. What do libraries do? They fulfill an essential function of society by having as their primary role the selection, acquisition, organization, and preservation of information and the provision of access to and services for that information. Societies need professionals in specialized institutions who take on this role. This won't happen by accident. Others may from time to time provide one or more of these functions as a secondary role (e.g., Google makes money by selling ads and, as a by-product, indexes web pages). But society needs institutions that fulfill all these functions as their primary activity. The web is a tool libraries can use to do that, but the web is not the library.

When we see some of those functions being performed on the web and it tempts us to say that the web is a library, we need to ask ourselves if we really have everything we want: organization AND access? Access AND preservation? Selection AND service? etc. And we should be particularly careful about relying on commercial services that replace the public function served by public institutions. Will privatization of "organization" (e.g., Google's book-scanning project) reduce access and fair use and replace copyright with license agreements? Private companies must, by law, make money for their stock-holders; any "public service" they perform is secondary to that. We need institutions whose primary function is public service related to information selection, preservation, and service. What would you call such an institution but a "Library"? Just today I reread an old article that addresses some of these issues and, though it is dated, I still recommend it.

• Griffiths, Jose Marie (1998). "Why the Web is not a library." In The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the Twenty-first Century, eds. B. L. Hawkins and P. Battin, pp. 229-246. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 1998.

In it, Griffiths asks, "...why is there an assumed headlong dash into digitizing everything in sight while beating a chaotic retreat from the functions our libraries and librarians have fulfilled for centuries?" She has lots of answers for what libraries are and should be and some of them are still relevant today almost ten years after she wrote this piece. Thinking like this and the planning being done by The Institute For The Future Of The Book and the Digital Library Federation is a good thing that we should, I believe, encourage. (See the really modern library.)

Not a Technological Problem

I also believe that, though we do have lots of wonderful technologies, the problems are not technological, but social, political, and economic. Two recent articles said as much. One was an article about the World Library (Checking Out Tomorrow's Library, by John Ward Anderson, Washington Post, October 18, 2007, page A21). In it, Paul Saffo, a long-time Silicon Valley technology forecaster, says

The challenges here aren't technological... the issue is the will to make it happen.

I believe that "the will to make it happen" has to include a societal-scale recognition of the information needs of society, not just a hope that things will work out because technologies make it possible and lots of volunteers might make it happen. We need to think in terms of public access to information, not just commercial, privatized access. And, in a recent editorial (Sue the libraries - they're letting people get content on the cheap by Andrew Brown, The Guardian, October 18 2007, p2 of the Technology section) Brown, who is an English writer and journalist, said,

This isn't a technological problem.... The problem, as usual, is a social one: it can only be solved by collective action, and there is no better means of sharing in the information age than old-fashioned, unglamorous libraries, even when you can use them at home.

I think this sums it up pretty nicely. Technology provides us tools to get more information to more people better than we ever have before. But it can also be used to lock-up information and make it harder to get and more expensive. We'll always need libraries because libraries do something that societies need and that no one else does -- not publishers or readers or the private sector.

Plans for a World Library were announced with great fanfare earlier this week.  It's a nice idea but I have to admit, my first thought when I learned of this project was "Why?"  We already have a digital library that covers the world.  It's called the web.  Yeah, I know the collection could use a little weeding but still, it's up and running and being added to all the time.  Are grand designs and top-down planning still the way to go in a time when anyone with a laptop, a scanner, and a DVD burner (or good bandwidth) can crank out gigabytes of data?  The other day I was visiting a friend and, while we sat talking in his livingroom, he burned a DVD for me containing every Black Flag album,  every Sonic Youth album, every Minutemen album, and every Husker Du album ever released.  It was all done in about 20 minutes.  Now I'm not saying that scanning the Mabo Case Manuscripts would be as easy, and I have tons of respect for those who labor to provide access points to such things, as well as the folks who coordinate such activities.  But I do worry because the methods for organization are already here, the technologies are already here, and while smart people spend time crafting carefully worded discussion papers, things are disappearing.    

Many of us who are drawn to U.S. federal publications end up traveling to our Nation's capitol fairly regularly, if we don't live there already.  Over time, we develop constellations of memories about "the first time I did" this or that in Washington DC.  We attend GPO-sponsored events like the formative Interagency Depository Seminar (alumna, class of 1993) or the Depository Library Conference & Council meetings; we tour famous sites and museums; we recall our first time on the Mall, seeing cherry blossoms, and riding the Metro.  Special people in our lives are willing to show us "their" Washington DC, and their perspectives further enrich our understanding of all the secrets within the Beltway.
 
There are also special Washington DC people we visit -- our family or friends -- who are completely outside the govdocs realm.  For fifteen years, I've had a standing date (always dinner and a walk) with a reference librarian from the Library of Congress, Art Emerson.  Art served as the Library of Congress subject expert for Australia and New Zealand.  He was a contemporary of mine from the University of Michigan School of Information and Library  Studies (its old name).  Art and I would look forward to our annual time together:  what new memorial would we see?  What museum just opened?  What ethnic restaurant was fabulous and as yet undiscovered by the hordes?  I'll never forget the night he took this small town girl on a no-holds-barred tour of the Metro's steepest escalators, because he knew what fear and excitement these inspired in me.  He took special pride in my teary-eyed first glimpse of the LC Main Reading Room and the restored Jefferson Building.  When he visited the Northwest this past year, we took him to see Seattle's favorite Australian import, Lauren Jackson, play a mean game of basketball.
 
My friends and I were shocked to learn that Art Emerson died last week.  A health problem had been building, stealthily, for some time, until it finally manifested itself and ended his life.  He was 51.  He had spent a glorious year at the State Library of New South Wales.  He helped people all over the world discover treasures of one of the greatest libraries on Earth, and a federal library at that.  He was still planning his next trip to Australia, perhaps planning his next book project after his Historical Dictionary of Sydney.  He had a wicked sense of humor and a mind that would be the envy of any scholar.  With the serendipity that always seems to happen around a death, I turned over a scrap of paper on my guest room floor last night to find that it was a card for Tony Cheng's Seafood Restaurant and Mongolian Barbeque, the last restaurant I visited with Art.  I'm too sad to eulogize him further right now, and FGI is not the place to do so.  But I thought in Art's memory, I would ask the FGI readership:  what are some of your favorite secret spots in  Washington DC?  What special person introduced you to these?  How has Washington DC changed who you are as an information lover?

Rob Pierson met yesterday with the folks in charge of Thomas at the Library of Congress. Rob is Vice-President of Technology at the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy and reported on his meeting to the Open House Project Group.

• Re: Thomas Feature Requests?, by Rob Pierson, Open House Project (Google Groups) Jun 5, 2007. 7:15 am.

Rob's message has several things of interest to government information professionals including:

• The relationship betweeen the CRS Legislative Information System (LIS) and Thomas.
• The rationale for having a less featured search system for Thomas (they are trying to appeal to a different audience).
• Thomas and LIS are both working on upgrading their systems and the Thomas folks are working extensively with the LIS folks and are incorporating elements of LIS into Thomas.
• Their expectation that the new XML bill summary database would probably be available through GPO and might not be freely available to the public. "The XML version of bills and roll call votes is currently available to the public for free, and it would be a very problematic break with that precedent if GPO began selling legislative XML data. This isn't yet set in stone, however."

Rob also attached a document, which provides a background into what LIS is planning for the future, as well as some history of the group. You can download it from the URL above and i've also put a copy for your convenience here. (THE LEGISLATIVE INFORMATION SYSTEM: OBJECTIVES AND PLANS FOR THE RETRIEVAL SYSTEM IN THE YEAR 2007, Prepared by the Congressional Research Service and the Office of Information Technology Services Library of Congress, January 2007.)

I would be very interested to hear if anyone knows if GPO plans to sell the XML data or make it available without charge or if they have not decided and are considering charging.

James H. Billington, The Librarian of Congress, testified before the House Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch on March 20, 2007. read Billington's full testimony here.

Billington pointed out that digital information is particularly fragile, but as the number of "digital transactions" that the LOC handles on a yearly basis, is extremely useful and of interest to students, historians, researchers and the general public. Billington said, "No single institution can collect, save and provide access to digital content in the future. Almost all of the Library's digital initiatives involve learning to work in new ways, in a networked environment, where we are working with others to amass critical content and deliver new and improved services." Check out "LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress" to see the LOC's analysis of the library's digital future.

We're not saying that every library has to manage 295 terabytes of digital content, but ALL libraries should be thinking about, planning for and working toward being digital repositories for their communities. That includes digital deposit, harvesting and other avenues for building digital collections.

It took two centuries for the Library of Congress to acquire today's analog collection—32 million printed volumes, 12.5 million photographs, 59.5 million manuscripts and other materials – a total of more than 134 million physical items. By contrast, with the explosion of digital information, it now takes only about 15 minutes for the world to produce an equivalent amount of information. Researchers at Cal-Berkeley produced estimates of the amount of information produced and circulated on the Internet in 2003 – it was equivalent to 37,000 times the content of one Library of Congress. Most of this information exists only in digital form: so-called born-digital items, many of which are already irretrievably lost.

There is a widely-held but false assumption that digital materials accessible today on one's PC or Blackberry will necessarily be available in the future. That is not the case. The average life of a Web site has been estimated to be 44 to 75 days (bold added), and information not actively preserved today could literally be gone tomorrow. Other essential digital information—most notably e-journals and data bases—are merely licensed for use in the short term– the information does not belong to the licensee. By contrast, traditional print books and journals collected by the Library for more than two centuries are, and will remain, in the possession of the Library and accessible to researchers. But it is current information that is often most needed by Congress, and current, up-to-date information is increasingly available only in digital form.

It's been one of those crazy weeks with lots going on. So rather than blog all the things that I had planned to blog about this week (and last week while in Seattle for ALA!), here's the list of open tabs on my browser. Ahhhhh, I feel better now :-)

• Sloan Foundation funds "open" alternative to Google Book Search [Shoutout to Rick Prelinger!]
• Copyright, DRM Technologies, and Consumer Protection March 9 & 10, 2007 ~ University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law
• The Daily We: Is the Internet really a blessing for democracy?. article by Cass R. Sunstein
• Why reference and authority matter [Thanks jessamyn!]
• GODORT's new wiki!. Try it, you'll like it!!
• How to disable Google personalized search. For you privacy nuts...er...concerned folks out there.
• Jake Appelbaum lecture on anonymous communication. And another for the privacy-concerned.
• WIPO anti-podcasting treaty refuses to die
• BoingBoingBoing podcast 9: Matt Haughey of MeFi
• Sen. "Series of Tubes" Stevens introduces DOPA II: the sequel

My first take on the THOMAS beta is now available online at LLRX.com -- specifically at http://www.llrx.com/columns/govdomain23.htm. (The full January issue of LLRX is not up yet, so you have to go directly to this URL.) The Library of Congress is looking for feedback, so be sure to use the THOMAS beta comment page if you have something to say.