 Well good evening. Hello. My name is Jonathan Zitron and I am so pleased to be here with you all today to hear from John Palfrey on the occasion of the release of his book, Bibliotech. Why libraries matter more than ever in the age of Google. Nicely focused group to get Google in there as well. Very nice Google term. Yes, yes. First is logistics. This is being recorded so your image, if not soul, are being captured for posterity. It is not being live webcast but it will probably go up later unless something truly substantively catastrophic happens. And what else should we know? We're going to go until around 7, 7.15 at which point there will be a reception next door that can also spill over onto the outdoor patio to which everybody is invited. And John has done about a dozen talks so far on the road for this book. So our challenge is to ask him questions that he has yet to hear from the road, which is very exciting. He's spoken to a group as small as about 30 or 40 at the Andover bookstore and as big as a thousand at a conference called Computers and Libraries. Yes, that was it. Good eponymous title. A solid non-focused group, eponymous title for computers and libraries. They had to alternate every year. Libraries and computers. Anyway. I'll send them that suggestion. That's very good. So how to introduce John. John is a lawyer. He is gets a chortle through the room. But it's okay. He's an unpracticing lawyer unless you think of practicing in the larger sense. Now he did do a turn at ropes and gray before being rescued by the Berkman Center. Is there almost as long as Yochai Benkler who is also here? Ah, forget that Yochai also did a turn at ropes and gray. Good times. Yes. But John worked for the EPA for a while, a regional office handling. You were kind of like in a political sort of role. Yes. Anything more you want to tell us about the EPA? Nope. As you can see, it was a political role. And John was executive director of the Berkman Center and was the one who really put the center into warp drive and took it from a kind of small place in a hallway to a larger place that met fire codes much better than it did before. And that really had an inclusiveness to his way of running the place that has been reflected in the substance that he has thought about since. A book on interop, interoperability. And this in a way is a book about interoperability and thinking about the mortar that cements the various bricks we have together in ways that keep civil society going. That's so much I think of what John thinks about and of course, day to day now after having done a turn as a professor here, director of the library here at the law school. And now is the head of school at Phillips and over, which he is in the process of completely reinventing and doing all sorts of cool things which we might hear about. So John is just one of these people who is not a podium thumper, doesn't shout to be heard. He simply has really persuasive and interesting and thoughtful things to say. And the kindest ethos, both at the institutional and personal level, somebody that I find myself going to for counsel and many, many others as well. And I have yet to receive a bill. So that's how I know he's really not a practicing lawyer. So John, we're so pleased to see you. Note that in some quirk of things, there are exactly three copies of this book available for sale around the corner. Yes, but they will also, because they only have three copies, put you on the list to order one on Layaway at a 30% discount. So that's a good deal of the evening. John, you're 100% here. Thank you so much for spending time with us tonight. And we're so excited what you have. Thank you. And thank you so much. And thank you all for coming. This is very touching to see such a great crowd. I feel like I'm coming home in a way and to see so many people that I've worked with both at the Berkman Center and the Harvard Law School Library and the Harvard Libraries broadly. I'm truly, truly grateful to see you here. This book that I have written is a love letter to libraries and to those who work in them, the librarians in particular. It is also, I hope, an argument for why libraries are so crucial, especially in the age of Google. And all of that I learned from those people in this room. And I'm really grateful for all of your help in doing it. I'm going to try to talk for no more than 20 or 25 minutes, and then hopefully get into conversation. I would love to hear much of what is on your mind and the challenge, as Jonathan said, with questions that I haven't yet heard on this book tour. This may be the only place on my book tour where somebody will know what this actually is. Is there anybody who recognizes this picture? No, it comes from, yes, Peachy. Yes, that's so great. This is the first time someone has known the answer to that question. And I ask it everywhere. This is the personal library of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who, of course, was a professor here, but this was actually his home in Washington, D.C. And I love this picture for a whole bunch of reasons. It reminds me of the Harvard Law School Library and the awesome librarians and archivists who work in it, and the fact that they digitized this amazing collection of Oliver Wendell Holmes's. But it also, to me, is a great challenge to all of us when we think about libraries and the libraries of the future. And the reason I see it as a challenge is this room, to me, is really, really appealing. The idea that you could have a space in your home that is surrounded by books in this way and sit in that chair and think of all the great opinions that Holmes thought up. Now, we know he had a few clangers and so forth, so we thought of some bad ones, and maybe he didn't do it here. But just the idea that he was inspired by sitting there. And for many of us, we work with young people. I now live with and work with about 1,100 teenagers. And I think a ton about what inspires them, what kind of space would inspire them, what kind of a library space would. And for most of our teenagers, my guess is that this might be a cool and inspiring space, but for almost none of them would they sit up, swirl around that chair and then pull one of those off the shelf. For those of us who worked in the Harvard Law School Library, I was always struck by the fact that we were almost always full as a library, cheek by jowl, those kids were there. Very often they had those approved Harvard Law School Library mugs, and they had a casebook, right? They were highlighting way in the casebook, but they weren't doing a ton of pulling statutes or other things off the shelves. Almost never, at least in the big reading room, literally never. And maybe if they had a great reference library and they might have found something. But by and large, they were there for other reasons, right? They are there probably right now studying away for other reasons. And I think our challenge in a way in a digital era is to come up with something that is as powerful and appealing a space for kids as a learning space and as an environment in libraries. And I think that's the challenge back on all of us who are trying to design and to create these spaces in an exciting way. And I think we do this against a backdrop where libraries are to some extent in peril. Now I stand in a room, I realize at Harvard, the place where the unbelievable support for libraries exists. But even within Harvard, we know that there are different schools that support libraries at different levels. Our Dean is here. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being a lover of libraries. Not just evidence by the fact they are here, but because of all that you do to make libraries great here. But even within the context of Harvard, we went through a several year period of quite a bit of transition. I was a part of that too. And we know that there are times when libraries are under a great deal of pressure. That is true in academic settings. And obviously this is a difficult context for many. But it's particularly true, I think, in public libraries. And as I've traveled around in school libraries, the 100,000 or so school libraries around the country, very often people have a funny view that libraries aren't maybe as useful as they once were, which I think is exactly wrong, which is why I wrote this book. This is a quote from an Amazon review by somebody I do not know. His name is David Weinberg. It is not David Weinberg or our friend. But this was a not particularly flattering review on Amazon of my book. And it was disagreeing, basically, with the premise of the importance of it. But I thought it was a particularly good view that sums up what some people think. And it is a prevailing view out there. I realized often also when I was writing the book that one of the most common conversations that I had after becoming the director of the Harvard Law School Library was one at a backyard barbecue or a cocktail party. And someone would come up to me and say, so what are you up to? And I would say I'm just becoming the director of this library. And then two seconds later, the person would interrupt me and say, oh, wait a minute, libraries aren't as useful anymore. You're the digital guy. You're getting rid of them. You're getting rid of all the books. And then they'd have walked away. In the sense, I never had the chance to kind of grab them and say, no, no, no, libraries are more important than ever. And here's what we have to do. And so that's why I wrote the book in a way. It was to answer that question for all those people who walked away from me at parties. They're not probably going to be reading the book again. The irony of that, but I still felt I had to win the argument. But I say it in a serious tone, which is we recognize that in many communities, when there is a choice between money for police and fire and education and other important things, and this is true in my hometown now of Andover too, the library doesn't get as much support. The support is eroding for libraries in these communities. And I think we need to reverse that polarity. We do this also, though, I think in the context, at least in the United States, of an amazing culture of support for libraries and a history of support for libraries. This image comes from our hometown of Boston, right across the river. Every time I see this, I get chills down my spine. The idea of free to all. The idea that the big municipal public library started right here about 150 years ago and with incredibly simple democratic premise. The basic idea that information should be free, knowledge, should be free to anyone, regardless of their ability to pay. And this was something that is in the cradle of, you know, the Athens that we created here in Boston, the middle of our city in Copley Square. And so we have a history of making this kind of amazing support for our communities, for our democracies. And part of what I worry about in this moment of peril for libraries is that we will lose sight of that and that, oddly, we actually might backtrack. We might actually have less access in our democracy to information in a digital age than in an analog age. And that would be terrible. That would be, I think, perverse. I think that's true for a variety of reasons. And a simplistic version of that argument is to say increasingly as knowledge moves to the cloud, one could imagine it being vastly more available that anybody with one of these devices could get access to whatever they wanted. But there are a couple of reasons why that's not so simple or so true. One is, if you look at the owners of the cloud, in essence, they're almost all private firms. They're almost all parties that are private companies and doing it for profit, which is not a bad thing. And this is not an anti-corporate screed. So much as, to say, public spaces in cyberspace have been things that we've had to win. It's what Jonathan Citrin and Yochai Benkler and the Berkman Center have had to create and really care for and establish. As we hurdle to a cloud-based environment, by and large, we turn to private players, like Amazon and others, to store our stuff. So in a very simple mode, if we increasingly create our materials and put them in private hands, as opposed to, say, in the public hands, or roughly speaking public spirited hands, of libraries and the research universities that have libraries, I think that is a dangerous thing. There are many other ways in which it's tricky, and we can come back to that, but I think it is something worth worrying about a little bit. There's a way to make this a bit more precise, which is for those who have worked in libraries, you know that it's not always possible for libraries to do exactly in the digital age what they've done in the physical age. One of the ways in which this is true is the lending of e-books. So, by and large, publishers have made it tricky to lend e-books on the same terms that you could lend a physical book. And this is where it is relevant that we are at a law school, of course, because in fact they are treated in two really different ways. The background law for lending stuff like this is actually really, really good. The background copyright, in a simple sense, is positive, which is libraries for hundreds of years have been able to buy something like this and then do more or less whatever they wanted with it, right? You could bring it to a secondhand bookstaff and sell it, or you could lend it as many times as you want it, or you could tear it up, or you could digitize it, do lots of things. But it turns out that if you get that same book and you put it on one of these devices and a library is wishing to get it on terms that it can license to someone else, all of a sudden it is governed not by the background copyright law, so much as it is governed by the contract law that the company sets up, the publisher sets up with the library. And for all those who have worked in libraries, you know that you can't always get e-books on as good terms as you can get physical books. And some of the outcomes are perverse and bizarre, like you can't read it aloud, right? Those are some of the worst of the terms. Some of the other terms have been the 26 lend rules. Anybody remember that great offering from a publisher? The notion that you could get one of these for whatever the full price was, and Jonathan and I could lend it back and forth 26 times, and then of course it would go away because it would have worn out, right? That premise didn't work out all that well. The basic idea though is that it has not been possible for libraries to get digital materials on as good a deal or in fact as often as they could get it in physical form. And this I think is a dangerous premise. It's also the case that when it is a contract between the company and the library, there's also something tricky behind it with respect to the ability to store it over a long period of time too. So if the point is we're paying it as though we were leasing for it when we stop paying for it, it could go away. So in fact, libraries might in fact not have collections if we were only turning from owners of the information and the knowledge into those who are leasing it or ventures. And many people have worked on this from many different angles. Here I would say in the cradle of the open access movement, that is one great answer to it. We're at the FAS level and Bob Darten and others led the effort there. And at Harvard Law School where we've committed to putting our materials in the commons in an open access way, that's not such a big deal. But for the vast majority of what is created and published, we actually have potentially a less good arrangement going forward if we don't change the deal that is being offered for digital materials. Just out of curiosity, if you were reading something, how many people still prefer this hard copy kind of book? The vast majority. How many people prefer an e-book? Relatively few. And how many people are more or less agnostic? You kind of do both. I think that may be the growing group actually is those who want to read this at night, but carry this on a plane. I think that's kind of the growth. Oh, Stuart Schieber, also the open access champion. I'm sorry I didn't see you there before. Congratulations and thank you. But the basic point being that we need to ensure that in a digital age there is just as much access from a democratic perspective as there's been if not more so. So this picture shows a moment in time when we were actually building that Boston Public Library, when we were putting up this amazing edifice in the middle of Copley Square. It was a few decades after the library started in 1890. And the reason I love this picture is because I think that's roughly speaking the moment we find ourselves in now. We have a moment where we are building for the future the next set of libraries. And it is a set of libraries that will exist both in digital form and in physical form. And I think we actually ought to be thinking about this in architectural form. So does anybody recognize this one? A lot of people work in this building. This is a side elevation of Langdell Hall. And it is to my mind the moment that we're in right now which is where we are convening together I think or ought to be convening those people who think about information architecture and the importance of the digital era and how we actually frame and make accessible information with the analog era. I think that the future will be a hybrid of libraries that are very much physical spaces but also which connects to the cyberspace that we are creating. And I think in order to do that well what we need to do is actually convene all of these people together and actually work in a way that is much more collaborative than we've done in the past. One of the ways in which we've been doing that and many people in this room are to thank for that. Bob Darden called together a group of people, 40 people at Radcliffe Institute a few years ago to convene an effort really to say can we in fact come up with the design for a combined public and private effort to create a combined hybrid digital and physical infrastructure. That has become the idea behind it, the digital public library of America. 40 people in that room actually agreed to this sentence to create an open distributed network of comprehensive online resources and this sort of a crazy ambitious thing that nobody thought in fact could work but somehow it has. And Rebecca Haycock and many people here have made it come together. I think it's one example of what we can do to solve this problem. Okay so pause there for a second and say what are the elements of a library in a digital age that the digital public library of America and other things might be able to bring about. I think fundamentally libraries remain about people. So I think that the crucial aspect of libraries is keeping the humanity in the transaction between people and information, people and knowledge. I think one of the challenges that people often throw out about libraries is we don't need them so much because people can help themselves so easily through these kinds of devices. One example of this that struck me as I was writing the book about the importance of librarians happened in the small town library in Andover Mass. I was editing one chapter and it was about three o'clock in the afternoon and a whole pile of kids came in after school which is a fun thing that happens. Libraries fill up with students who are spilling out of schools when they close and the kids all went into the teen section and some of them were doing their homework and others were gaming and doing other things and one of them was trying to do a science thing and the kid turned to his iPhone and he said Siri what does terminal velocity mean? This was in the middle of a library and Siri it turned out did not know what terminal velocity meant but like three feet away was an amazing librarian and I was sure that that woman could have either told him exactly what terminal velocity meant or at least shown him probably better the way to find out about terminal velocity. You see these examples over and over again but I think it is important to note and this is one of the aspects of this book that is a little challenging is there is a tough love story here which is when we study young people and how they look for information librarians are pretty low on that list the project information literacy studies are probably the clearest in that zone the kids often do look to Google and Wikipedia they often look to their teachers in that particular class but we have to do a better job I think as librarians and people work in libraries to ensure the kids actually do go and use these resources and know to do that we actually have to prompt them to do it and to teach them to do it but I start with the humanity as a key element of libraries in a digital age. Second I think libraries have to shift from being stand alone silos which I think there have been lots of reasons for them to be to being platforms and to being connected entities. So this I think invokes a lot of the work that you have done in the wealth of networks and otherwise if you think about the history of libraries go back thousands of years to the library at the palace of ebola for instance in modern day Syria or the library of Alexandria the idea behind the library in a way was you brought all that material whatever you could get you brought it to a particular place and now you might think about it as bringing to a particular school or a particular zip code all of those materials and that was understandable as a previous iteration of libraries and I still think to some extent we do that and too often I sometimes hear of schools bragging about how many volumes they have or how much they spend on their libraries in order to attract kids or people I think that misses the point I think it misses the point that by working much more together and actually by seeing libraries as a connected series of platforms as part of the network that they can accomplish much more this particular design of a platform is the D.P.L.A.'s rough structure the digital public library of America and the key to it in a way is the fact that it is just a whole pile of open source code with a whole pile of open metadata and as much open access materials you possibly can have and a bunch of different parties in this case service hubs are states by and large content hubs are things like Harvard University thank you Sarah Thomas and others for contributing material in and the ability to export it on a bulk basis for anybody who wishes to do it and as you see from the top the notion that nobody has yet figured out the right way to present library material in a digital age and the point is that we can have lots of potential front ends we can have lots of different applications and ways to share our materials especially if we think of them as platforms pool the materials together and make it possible through an open application open API an ability to create any open any front end that you would like so today there is one way to get it which is DP.LA you could go on your mobile device or your computer and you could find a search engine in a way into all of these materials but likewise if you go back a screen that's just this particular front end though I think the ultimate success of the project is that any library could create on this open API the ability to find a better way to do this presentation to find a way to present this material and any library could create an application or a front end that would in fact make it so that nobody even knew that the DP.LA was there the DP.LA could be ultimately entirely plumbing and the success be in the way in which different communities have presented this material that's a very different way of thinking about libraries as institutions but it's about taking advantage of what the miracles of the web have made possible in that magic and that I think requires us to be a little bit less egocentric as institutions and much more seeing it as a way to share as of right now just a small plug for where the DP.LA is we have filled up about a third of the map in terms of places contributing materials into this digital public library of America the red states I suppose that's maybe not the color should have used for this in this room but the red states are the ones that do have up and running actually it's perfect color colors in that way they have service hub so if you look at Massachusetts we have the digital Commonwealth and if you think about what the digital Commonwealth is it's a fabulous example for what the rest of the country could do so at the Boston public library there are people like Guy Tom Blake and a team and what they do is they go out to all the 351 cities and towns in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and help them digitize materials and add metadata to it and then share it up through a statewide portal what the DPLA does is it creates a way to share that on a national basis so if you imagine if every state had a digital Commonwealth equivalent we would in fact be building for the country an amazing series of on ramps into something that everybody could access and we're about a third of the way there Dan Cohen who's the current executive director and others are doing a fabulous job of filling out this map if you happen to come from any of these states that do not yet have a DPLA hub and you would like to be one let us know because we can get you signed right up the other thing that's important to look at are these yellow ones the content hubs those are the big institutions like Harvard and others bless you who are in the process of digitizing tons of material and making them available in this particular way to the rest of the country and my hunch is if we could have every institution doing what the National Archive is doing and doing what Smithsonian is doing and New York Public and Harvard and so forth we would be creating potentially the most amazing library that has ever existed in the world and that I think is a very exciting premise much of it does come from the work of people who are literally in this hand than this in this room this is the Oliver Wendell home suite which is all of those materials including that first image that I showed and if you think about these collections that once were called hidden collections at Harvard they were sort of hidden away in different places I think even if we just put them on the web and we have people come find them they're still a little bit hidden and I think part of the key to the step that we're taking right now and particularly as we take amazing collections like the Oliver Wendell home's collection and other ones that are extremely well curated and shared we can make them unhidden in this same network model by putting it in the DPLA now of course we should caveat the problem of copyrights and come back to that later but subject to any licenses that we have that we can share it I think putting things in this shared repository makes them much more valuable Second, I think that by doing it in this way in an open way with an open API as a chance for people to be able to do anything they wish with the information we will be able to unleash a whole lot of innovation so this is an old schematic but one that came from the Harvard Library Innovation Lab is it still called H Harvard Library Innovation Lab I'm going to give a couple of examples from that you may think about libraries and worry about some of the things we would lose if we were to go in a digital direction which we continue to I think one of those fears has been serendipity the idea that if you do not have physical libraries you don't actually have a shelf you don't have a place where you can go and get a call number and walk in and find a book that you want and then see all those other amazing books that are to the right and the left of them and you probably all have that experience of coming out with ten books when you thought you were coming out with one and I think that's one of those things that we don't want to lose when we go from physical libraries to whatever future we're going toward my hunch is that even if we contract the stacks a little bit we shouldn't contract them any more than we already have just to be clear that we actually can do some things that introduce new forms of serendipity we actually might be able in a hybrid world to do better than we have done in just the analog way and why is that one reason that take the Harvard example what's the current count of Harvard libraries is still in the 70s 73 73 distinct libraries within a system right the fact of the matter is when we also add in the depository 25 miles away there's actually no stack at Harvard right there's no place where you could walk in and see all of the books all the collection in the system so if you could imagine a world in which you have the stacks that are fabulous ones in Liberia and here in Langdell and so forth as one place to walk in but you also could combine all of the materials from all those 73 libraries plus all the materials in the Harvard depository in a virtual sense and create a virtual stack you could have new forms of serendipity you could actually find connections that were not previously possible or findable this was an example stack view was a rendering a way to put all of the Harvard collection together as you may know this was based on 2009 circulation data so circulation data for from a long time ago and the basic idea was very simple the idea was you could then search on whether different forms of metadata that people have added into the collection so in this particular case someone is searching for gravity's rainbow and they can see how many times that particular book has circulated in a certain period of time but you also might see that another book has circulated much more frequently you could also search of course on if you're a graduate student how many of your professors have checked out this version or another you could imagine if it were the Iliad we had 40 examples of that right and you might want to search on which of those translations or which of those forwards was most important you could imagine ways in which all of that great metadata that librarians have could become more valuable if it were a combination of the digital with the physical in somebody's hands and I think that is the possibility that lies ahead of us and why this research and development effort particularly on top of open systems is so important I would add one other example that I think is crucial also in the Harvard Library Innovation Lab is perma.cc for those who haven't followed this particular effort I think it's an amazing example of why libraries have a crucial role to play going forward I've talked mostly about the importance and democratic society of access to information and I think that is really the primary one for libraries but I think preservation of information and preservation of where the information is found is equally important in many respects for libraries one thing I fear is that if we don't actually think ahead the kinds of systems that we ought to have for the long term we're going to make an enormous mistake I think perma.cc is one example of how we can create permanent forms of digital archiving and where librarians actually can lead in a way that we have not done as much before this is a project that is currently ongoing I know Jonathan and his team we can talk about it afterwards so I won't explain it entirely and leave you with a chance to do it but I think it's an example of the amazing innovation that's happening in libraries and the importance of libraries playing this role one of the challenges I would put out to libraries in general is if you think about in the information era in the last several years I don't think most of the big innovations have actually come out of libraries so if you think about search that has come out of obviously big companies like Google if you think about recommendations by and large that has come out of big companies like Amazon and Netflix maybe and if you think about encyclopedias that came out of commodity traders head and a bunch of people who are collaborating in Wikipedia lots of other examples of it but I actually think libraries have not been on the forefront of the very big innovations and I still think that lies ahead as a possibility and with a series of open systems and collaboration I think that's entirely entirely possible I'm about to bring it in for a landing so here's the wind up to that I think ultimately the thing that libraries need most to do and where I think most of the excitement is is actually solving a series of problems that face communities and as I go around the country talking about this book or in the context of DPLA it's so clear that from many many perspectives libraries have a crucial role to play in communities and that could be very simply providing access to kids after school when they don't have another place to access information because they actually don't have a broadband connection at home we hear many kids getting assigned kinds of homework but they actually can't complete without being able to go to a library and then I heard from kids who at six o'clock actually when the library closed then had to go to McDonald's or Starbucks because that's where the free Wi-Fi was I think there's an enormously powerful role in bridging this participation gap in the digital divide from the library perspective I think that's true for job seekers it's true for people who are new immigrants to the country I think it's true for elderly people who have come to libraries as a social place these are hugely important roles that libraries continue to play outside of the scholarly realm and I won't go through all of those examples because everybody knows them so well here I think in the end we do need libraries as physical spaces does anybody recognize this library? Yes, the John Adams Library in Quincy Mass they're just such amazing spaces that have been created in libraries so my argument in no way is to say that we shouldn't have physical spaces glorious physical spaces in our communities I think libraries play an essential role in creating third spaces that are open and public I just think that people may come to them for different reasons and we may need to support them for very different reasons one thing you see about the Adams Library can imagine at this table that these were big reference tomes and I don't think people are necessarily going to come to library for reference tomes they're going to come for other reasons and I think part of our job is to figure out what those are I think we will continue to have physical books my argument is not in any way that we won't actually have physical and beautiful objects that present material I'm not positive that the market will be exactly as it is today my sense is we will have very beautiful physical objects and things that present in large sizes and in beautiful formats and we will have mostly digital materials otherwise I think things will be mostly born digital I suspect that eBooks will press on that Piperback market or the market of less beautiful objects but I think we still do have a material culture that people like and even kids seem to continue to like those physical objects so I don't think they're going away but we do have to figure out a way how do we support libraries when patrons hold up their hands just the way you did in this room many saying I prefer the paper some saying you prefer the digital and with a trend toward increasingly digital one of the things that we have put libraries in such a tough position with is saying with the same amount of money or less money you have to do both the digital stuff and the physical stuff that is an untenable position we've got to figure out a way whether it's through collaboration or continuing to support through funding or it's capital investment we have to figure out a way to allow libraries to be able to thrive in what is going to be both physical and digital as a world I think we should do it in a global context to be sure and this is one of the parts of Bob's Genius and others as we started out with the digital public library of America yes of course it's been seen as a national effort but it's been done in an international context United States is actually not the first country to come up with a digital strategy for their nation the Europeans actually were much further had at least time-wise in the form of Europe Ayana as an example and very much the first thing that DPLA did was to find a way to work with the Europeans and the notion was not to say we're just going to create one worldwide library or one worldwide digital library of Alexandria but to say we can actually have maybe 200 of them different countries having theirs but figure out how to make them interoperable how do you ensure that from the user perspective people actually can access these materials so one of the first things DPLA did was to create an exhibit on immigration that showed people going from the old world to the new and the new world to the old to ensure that as we built the system it would actually work on a global level we have the diversity and the difference and the innovation that happens in all these different country levels but we actually connected in a global vision and in some ways most importantly I put up here a map of Utopia you can see it here my view is we should dream really, really big this is the moment when we are designing what public libraries and scholarly libraries and school libraries can and should be for the future and I am not so polyanish to say that we are absolutely going to become Utopia that's not the point but the point is we should have something that we actually are building toward in mind it should be a shared vision that we're really excited about and I feel like that's entirely, entirely possible to put that vision ahead of us and to build as much toward it as we can and to say that we are not going to accept a world a digital world or a digital hybrid with physical world that's actually less good than what we've had in the past in terms of access in terms of preservation in terms of commitment to democratic ideals and I think there's an extremely exciting moment to come together so I hope very much that you will share your questions with me but most importantly thank you for being engaged in the discussion about the future of libraries and I look forward to working with all of you to make it very bright thank you so much thank you indeed for this sparkling call to action we should take questions comments so hands are going up microphones are with Dan at least so Dan we've got it going and feel free to tell us who you are and arguments most welcome hard questions go to Jonathan good evening my name is Yonatan Kamensky I'm an incoming student at Simmons-Gistlas awesome and I was intrigued by the discussion of trying to replicate its serendipity in the digital world particularly the slide with gravity's rainbow looking at metadata while trying to replicate the experience of viewing items on a stack has anyone looked at doing the opposite and what I mean is taking the digital and putting it in the physical stacks probably through augmented reality technologies maybe something as simple as QR codes people all have fancy little computers in their hands it seems to me there'd be some way to do that has anyone done that work Oculus library you'd be staggering around just you could do it right here and just pull stuff up is that is that the idea something a little bit less cumbersome hopefully sounds like a fabulous project and a great one for you to do during your master's degree for sure or PhD or whatever it comes next in a serious way I think the group that I've heard most talking about this kind of thing around here and it is Jeffrey Schnapp here or others who worked with the library test kitchen this was very much that that kind of thing that group was working on I would restate a little bit at least what I was trying to say which was not entirely to replace or to take the physical experience and put it online but really to rethink what the combination of those two things would be and I think that's exactly your point which is some of the things that might actually work would be looking at what are some of the pathways that people use today online that actually could supplement or augment the physical and I think that's where excitement would lie would be that interface between those two and trying to make an experience that could be better than what we've had to date Can we navigate the mic up to the next place? Ah, here's one from Amar too we can alternate back and forth so John, I would like to ask a self-interested question because I've just written something about it that is an attempt at an answer and you should just for the record identify yourself Oh, I'm Bob Darnton University Librarian What do you think should be the top priorities for the Library of Congress and what should the new librarian who will assume his or her position on January 1st do? It's a wonderful question Well, Professor Darnton I think the first thing that should happen is that the President should invite you to take up that post in a few months now that you're available which I think would be a tongue I think the next person should do a couple of things that I think the Library of Congress has not done One is in a fundamental way to see itself as a national library and I think the Library of Congress in some respects has dodged that for a long time by saying in part it's a research arm of the Congress and in part it's sort of our national library but not quite I think you have to grab it and say this is the national library and we are not the whole thing but we are connected to the rest of it and should actually play nice with the rest and to say that there in fact is a really positive role that the Library of Congress can play in an interconnected and networked world I think that would be one I think two would be then sort of a conceptual shift but an important one I think two would be to take on mass digitization in a meaningful way so I think that people have often pointed to the world digital library and the 11,000 or so objects that have been digitized in it that's a too small a number I think for Internet scale and I think for an entity like the Library of Congress to take up this job of mass digitization and to work with the National Archives which has been hard to work at it the Smithsonian, the GPO lots of other parties in the government and actually lead that effort I think that could be enormously powerful a third thing would be join the DPLA so one of the absurdities I think of the process we've had for five years is that we have the National Archives we have the Smithsonian we have the GPO we have lots of other federal agencies participating and yet the Library of Congress has resisted our invitations for all that time which seems to me bizarre but it's been true anyway I could go down the list but I think the opportunities for leadership particularly in the digital realm but in that combination of the digital and the physical it could be enormous whoever the other mic is Dean Minow Dean Minow John it's just so fabulous in the book everyone should buy it especially don't take the 30% discount just give them all the money so you see why we love our Dean well it's such a great book because you open up what the possibilities that the digital world offers to open up libraries while identifying what the traditional libraries have that are at risk my question to you is really threefold one what business models do you see going forward that can make the vision real secondly what legal changes would be necessary and feasible to make the changes real and the third is aren't there possibilities that we never saw before like maker spaces where the interactivity between the digital and the physical may open up something we never had before those are three awesome questions so the first one which is the hardest one is the business model question my view is that by and large libraries shouldn't have to have a business model so by and large there is a public look at that that's so good basically I think libraries are a public good and I think that the business model should be that through our taxpayer dollars we should support public libraries and the United States really is the leader of that and actually Boston really has been the leader of that since the BPL opened and then lots of small town libraries all those great H.H. Richardson buildings that look like Siever Hall and look like the parts of the law school those are the early formation of the public library system in the country and then of course there's the Carnegie libraries that spread out 1600 communities wide in the early 20th century so I think it that should be publicly financed by and large I do think that philanthropy has a huge role to play and one of the arguments that I make in the book is to say that at moments of key transition as Mr. Carnegie did and there are lots of reasons to criticize Carnegie but one thing he did was he put a lot of capital into libraries that spread them from big cities into lots of small towns at a crucial moment so I actually think it would be great if the Carnegie Corporation or the MacArthur Foundation or others would in fact stand up and say this is a moment to do a big investment of that sort after that I think you know one of the questions is to say should libraries be in the business of selling stuff or having a revenue model that looks otherwise you know I think that libraries, archives, museums are all asking these kinds of questions there are of course things that we can license and make some money on this library here of course has made some amount of money on royalties by virtue of taking materials we had and digitizing those allowing people then to sell them back to us or other libraries I think there's something in that but I would much rather see a business model that was focused on collaboration and one that was focused on open access and other things that I actually think we have the seeds of here rather than see it as something where we actually have to have a corporate style business model but others may disagree second of the three questions about legal changes I think just to state it really fast orphan works legislation should change so to Bob's question one of the great things about the Library of Congress is that position overseas the registry of copyrights and so the Library of Congress could stand up and say look really simply nobody is hurt by having orphan works legislation tens of millions of works that could be made available that are not being made available and if somebody finds that they're the copyright holder they then will be able to put it back into copyright if they wish to write or not and in fact I just can't see how orphan works legislation doesn't really help everyone section 108 reform there are special rules that relate to libraries there are special rules that allow libraries to do things for instance for those who have different abilities so for the blind and otherwise there are specific rules that are way out of date and ought to be reformed so we got a certain distance on section 108 reform we could go further and so forth so there are there are a series of things I think in that area that are crucial and the other piece of legal reform that needs to be tied to that is privacy reform I think libraries have done such a great job of being the places where we protect reader privacy we need to ensure that the law allows libraries to do that on an ongoing basis and last makerspaces yes for sure one things you pushed me to do when I first took this job was to focus on co-production the idea that libraries are spaces in which we are producing new knowledge of various sorts makerspaces are one example the new media labs popping up around the country are another I think they're great examples of bringing people into libraries to create new knowledge and I feel like that's that's the excitement of having you know an open application programming interface layer and so forth which is in person and from afar we can create new things that have never existed I was right here yep hi John Pat McCormack hey Pat former student Kenny school grad and I can't wait to read the book so excuse me if this is in the book no problem as excited as I am I won't have you one way or the other okay you know I'm very interested in the API and the platform and all that but my question is more mundane in the city where I live Somerville we're struggling to keep library branches open yes to restore them to create new spaces that aren't traditional and it seems like the this concept would allow us to open a library with fewer books assuming we have the platform as well that's not to say we don't need the books in different spaces to restore historic buildings and reuse them in different ways and I was just wondering the extent to which you you know you thought about this as a way of creating more flexibility lower cost barriers for physical libraries in our cities it's a great question and I understand Somerville has a fabulous new library and you've got lots of it's an exciting moment for Somerville in particular so my preferred answer was that we fund libraries fully and that they have a fabulous you know physical infrastructure and branches that are open and actually one of the things that Boston Public Library did was introduce the branch system as well so have lots of community based libraries and support them well I think the reality is that we don't in communities often make that full investment and I think that's where we have to say what so what can we do how do we embrace this future while also doing as much of the fabulous existing stuff as we can I think the only answer there is to collaborate is to say that we don't need to bring the same collection to every one of these physical spaces librarians of course have done this very well for a long time with interlibrary loan and with a variety of other forms of sharing but I think those can be amped up and done more extensively and of course as I've argued I think from a digital perspective every library should not be creating its own iPad app not every library should be creating its own various digital systems that is something that we can if we take a page enough out of the open source movement do in a collaborative way and I think that would allow for communities to make choices as to how they spend what are scarce or dollars so would I rather see fewer books in libraries of course not but I think where we have to make that choice do as much collaboration as possible to allow as much choice as possible over here did the mic find a new home this gentleman I think hi my name is Ron Newman I've been using libraries for about 54 years awesome I wanted to come back to that slide and what it represents it's very seductive on the other hand it also shows a limitation of physical stacks that they are now which is that a book when it comes into the library gets one Dewey decimal or library of Congress number and forever that's the one place where it is in additional system you can do better than that because you could have that book could sit on many different shelf lists is there an opportunity for some sort of like you know wiki kind of cataloging system to emerge from this so that many people can collectively catalog material better than one person can there's some people laughing Tracy do you want that one? Tracy Robinson does not wish it anyone else? you can just deliver it back to her hand who would that be? exactly so it's somebody in the Harvard library system likely it would be fitting to have the answer crowdsourced yeah that's exactly right I mean I certainly I certainly think that we have catalog systems that do allow different kinds of access points and they may not be as seductive and as appealing as this kind of display but they are initial and in some ways rudimentary attempts to combine digital information and physical information into a wide variety of indexes that give the user lots of ways to get into it the problem is they're a little too complex and so we still need to keep working at figuring out how to make it both simple but complex at the same time yeah I mean my answer Tracy knows vastly more about it than I do and from a technical perspective there are a zillion challenges behind it but I think from a conceptual perspective the idea that there is one indicator for something in an old school way as compared to saying you could have many more data points that allow different ways into it I think that conceptual shift is actually very, very important and I think the trend which is moving away from having the knowledge be in a particular cataloger or a particular catalog entry to one where in fact there are many more ways to identify the information and then do more with it I think that's sort of an obvious movement My name is Marcy Murninghan and my question pertains to the theme of hybrid and collaboration there are vast pools of financial assets swimming around every community billions and billions of dollars in the form of assets under management for tax-exempt institutional investors in theory those tax-exempt institutions are they exist to advance the public interest that is the reason for their tax-exempt status in Boston as we know is very rich in those kinds of institutions according to my research the top 60 tax-exempt institutions in Boston have combined assets of over 50 billion dollars there are ways it seems to me for tapping into some of that money and bending it toward the public interest that is to say institutions such as public libraries that otherwise rely on taxpayer revenue streams or even philanthropy I just encourage you to think more creatively about revenue sources that could be bent toward libraries in our nation's communities Thank you, that's very thoughtful I would imagine that one of those is this one is Harvard and others I also run a school that has a fair amount of capital not the same amount that this one does but I think that's important to note I think one of the reasons why I think it's incumbent upon this institution to do things like open access to do things like digitize its materials and share them more broadly even though there's not a revenue stream back to this institution is because I think we are private institutions that have a public purpose and I think if we don't see it that way I think we're making a huge mistake whether or not there would be a tax on these institutions that then goes back to public libraries I'm not sure that that's necessarily right either but it's a very interesting question and I think it's one that we have to figure out how we are justifying in a sense holding this amount of capital in a relatively small number of institutions We're here Hi, my name is Erica Charris and I'm a librarian over at Berkeley College of Music Awesome And the ideas that are swimming in my head that I'm hoping to hear what your thoughts are on if libraries are about people and libraries are becoming more digital how do we bridge the gap between the kid talking into his phone and the librarian sitting at the desk three feet away what does digital service necessarily look like? It's a great question I suspect many people in the room have great thoughts and answers to this I think part of it is actually as teachers that we actually have to tell that student to go talk to that person where you need to make that sort of human connection happen I think I've been teaching United States history this year to a group of 14 kids who are in their junior year of high school and I think one of the things you do is you assign kids to go talk to a librarian and to have them interface, therefore, with all these amazing things as part of a paper and I think that that kind of thing that many professors do here at the law school who will actually say in the course of working on something you actually must go spend time with a librarian I think that's actually a really positive thing to do and I think it creates connections and pathways that are essential and actually breaks down what is happening when in the digital world we sometimes withdraw even though we think it's more social sometimes we are withdrawing into away from human context so I actually think as educators in some sense we have to construct ways to bring people back together now, could it be? Go ahead, I don't know I would love to hear your... Well, I think you might be about to say what I'm about to ask you but I'm just kidding Well, so why didn't you say what it was on my mind? Suppose Apple comes to you with a proposal for your advice and Apple says, you know what? We'd like to improve the Siri experience and really we want Siri the easiest part of Siri is to answer the 20% of possible questions that 80% of the people ask which is like, what's the weather gonna be tomorrow or how can I catch the train exactly or I'd like to buy a book that maybe that won't happen but anyway there's a bunch of other questions that are long tail questions what if the way that we used to route letters that children wrote to Santa and addressed to the North Pole and they got sent somewhere, right? I think they still do they go to people who answer the letters I don't know what the liability policy is but what if similar to that we simply arranged for people asking Siri to route those two reference librarians around the country or the world who would then answer through the Siri pipeline and be attributed to and by the way, this is brought to you by the courtesy of a library and if you'd like to read more about it, blah, blah, blah what would your reaction be to that? Is that like, no, no that's exactly the kind of corporate mediated dehumanization that I rail against or would it be, this is exactly the kind of public-private partnership that would put libraries back at the center of the meaningful questions that people ask so I will answer that if I can ask my friend Yochai to answer it after I do because he's thought much more about that kind of Yochai is playing the role of Siri he's about to get, this is the advanced cold call request to my friend in a moment I was really interested to see the New York Times article about is Wikipedia in trouble as the numbers are declining and so forth anyway they run that article about every year they do but it was in the Sunday review this week which seems a little bit more serious it wasn't a great article but it was anyway so here are a couple of answers I would be hesitant to do that particular deal with Apple for the reason you're suggesting which is I worry that if what we keep doing is creating systems that do not have the library as the primary interface whether it's a public library or a research library or a special library or a school library I am troubled by that so the deal with Apple makes me nervous for a really really simple reason to do that. So the motto is free to all so long as you come to our doorway. Right, I'm not, well so long as you don't necessarily have to come through Apple's doorway, right? So if it were done in a truly open source way I could imagine that being very attractive it is if it's only through Siri or it's creating a system that relies upon Siri and the iPhone as opposed to an Android device or something like that. Well you could imagine building into the DPLA as part of that stack and have an API called Ask a Librarian and Siri can plug in and Google now can plug in. So that would be much more interesting for sure but I wouldn't do a deal I mean just think of Apple as the ultimate and exclusive somebody has written about this too as in you. So yes but only according to a structure that was truly open, right? I would think. One thing that we've talked a lot about with DPLA that's a fun idea which is like this is the idea of the Scanabago. So I don't know if people have heard this idea but it's called the Scanabago. I did not come up with it. Emily Gore who works at DPLA did. But the idea of the Scanabago- It keeps making Emily Gore be the recipient of the trademark infringement letter. No, no. The idea of the Scanabago would be to get a Winabago and put in the back of it a scanner and drive it around the country and have people bring out the materials that they have to scan them and then the people who are driving it would help put in the metadata and do the scanning and you could imagine like the documentary or the NPR piece sort of writes itself right of this notion of driving around the country and you could imagine it tapping into library students, people who just care about libraries so sort of Wikipedia and equivalents you could see it also really appealing to retired librarians as something that people could do as part of this network. And I actually think about when you know in reference to that librarians retire what are some of the things that would be really fun to do? It might be occasionally to be in this particular role which I think the DPLA actually could mediate in a really interesting way. So I think there is a version of what has made Wikipedia so successful that we could do four libraries to be really, really fun frankly. You think about Wikimania coming to a place like this as it did a bunch of years ago having DPLA fast be a place where people showed up and actually edited metadata and answered questions it'd be really geeky. It's like a collective antiques road show content. Yes, incredibly geeky. But there'd be a triage area at the beginning to see if there's a copyright problem. Well there could be that too. You could turn away a lot of stuff. That could be true too. These party boys are too young. Yeah or we could take a little bit of risk with respect to the copyright which would be a different and interesting conversation. Fascinating, Yochai. Yochai, would you, are you willing to? So jet lag from being away for a while, notwithstanding, I'll try to. Something that came out in the exchange between the two of you and the Skenevago is let's not talk about the corporate culture of Apple and Siri. Let's talk about the isolation of the interaction with the machine. And you said something earlier about the human experience of the library. You talked about the kids coming. And as you start to talk about the Skenevago and who would come and who wouldn't come, I'd love to hear more from you about what the human platform element is which is quite distinct from the DPLA platform is much more like that and is a form of a response to the Siri question that's about, even if it were fine from the corporate perspective, it takes the service aspect of the library and makes it available to isolated individuals. And the question is, can you sell a bit more either from the book or your experience with how you're thinking about building the library at your school about what it is that we do to support that human interaction that libraries traditionally have provided and how that connects, if at all, to this very powerful response you began with Martha's question of, don't need a business model, you need a story about the core of the public service and about the core of human interaction. Please put a little bit more flesh on those bones. So this is what happens when you hang out with your old professors is that they answer your question with a hard question back. I totally didn't miss that that's what just happened. I was hoping to give you some of the brilliance but we got in a different form, so thank you. So the hard question I think it's an important one. So step one from my perspective is the notion of humanity, which is I actually think that if we lose the notion of the incredible, incredible group of people who work in libraries, this is where the love letter starts, and the experience of somebody walking in, whether it's a scholar or it's a kid or it's an old person, whatever it is, that is a hugely important, I think, democratic interaction that actually doesn't have to do with the transaction. It doesn't have to do with the transaction, the sense of Netflix wants you to think about this movie instead of this movie. It has to do with people in a community supporting one another and doing what is civic work. So there's something that's just essential about that and no matter how quickly we hurdle toward the digital, I wanna be sure that that humanity is in the mix in a really fundamental way and that we don't lose it. So that I think is really, really crucial to it. Your question though also goes to what is the role of the librarian going forward? I would say in the tough love category in this book is actually saying to my friends who work in libraries and others that I actually think the shift we have to make is to see librarians as not necessarily working for a single institution so much as working in the public group in a networked way, right? So imagine if, so there are about 100,000 school libraries in the United States. There are, you know, call it 15,000 public libraries and call it another 10 or 15,000 other kinds of libraries. So you're talking about more than 100,000 but not more than 150,000 institutions. To the extent that each of these institutions had some percentage of, if it's one person or it's a percentage of somebody's time which is really devoted to this networked public effort I think would be vastly more powerful than as isolated institutions. And it really is that's a shift that would be saying to the dean, you're paying for people to be focused on your professor, supporting the professor or writing this great book on cooperation or whatever it might be, you actually have to divert a certain percentage of that to something that is the public good and by the way it will boomerang back in really awesome ways. And actually this is a bad example because I think this dean has made exactly that enlightened decision at Harvard Law School. But I think if every library were seeing itself in that way, I think that could be very powerful. I think there are lots of libraries in this room who actually live that experience but I'm not positive that that's exactly what every institution sees itself as doing as every town library, every school library and so forth. But I think that networked approach could be enormously powerful in ways that we haven't yet experienced. And I feel like it's taking some of the learning that has made the explosion of the web so exciting and the kinds of things that have developed from that and having that apply in the library space with all of these amazing principles and all this amazing material that I think is so exciting for what could come. In both the book and the presentation you've managed to kind of capture your optimism without being Pollyanna-ish about really what's so valuable about the library and the community it represents. But you also managed to put in at least two potential snakes in the garden that are really worrisome. I mean, you did a little riff on what we'd call the first sale doctrine that says that the anchor, the platform of that library for hundreds of years has been the idea that once you've got the physical artifact you can lend it to someone else which also became the anchor of the physical community because you had to go to the library to fetch the book. So much of just that lending is part of it. And you pointed out that a bizarre paradox about the unnecessary one, about digital advancements is congratulations, now we have a way of locking this stuff up tight where I might have a privilege if I could figure out how to unlock it but I can't figure it out and unlocking it itself may break the law. So that seems like one snake in the garden. I just wanted to see if you follow the dotted line do we end up with more and more stuff locked up as fewer and fewer of these get produced because the economics are just so simple as you also said at the end these might be interesting artifacts but they're not gonna be mass produced the way they are even still today. And the second snake in the garden is how you find stuff that previously the way to find stuff was through categorizations done by librarians who had professional ethics and responsibilities about how to order stuff and truly try to make it accessible without wondering about who paid them for product placement on the shelf. And now as you say, again and again we're going to Google one of a handful of companies for all information, not just monographs follow that dotted line out and do you see any difference from the trend that's already kind of overcome us of not going to the library or the library system for that kind of categorization those two snakes in the garden if that's what they are, what do you do about it? I think that's a very good summation and maybe that's where we should end so people can go do something else but I think- So they're going to fed you next door while eating. So glad or fed themselves, that's good since this is a celebration of libraries. No, I think those two snakes in the grass as they went their way through are huge risks and I would put, we didn't talk about the entire mass of the rest of copyright and the difficulty of doing something like DPLA given the sort of strictures of copyright so I think that's more like an elephant in the room than a snake in the grass, so obvious. But I think these two, the notion of the lack of an absence of a digital for sale doctrine and the requirement that libraries increasingly become leasers as opposed to owners, when you combine that with the sort of general corporatization this is something that goes back to the early studies of the internet and what Jamie Boyle and Yolka and others are writing about the inclusion movement, I think those are things those are lessons that we've learned in other parts of our scholarship that we have to apply over here in the world of libraries and actually seek to bend the arc of where the future will go or the future, that will be history I think that's a really, really important thing for us to stand up and say we don't want that version of what the future could hold and one of the reasons we don't want that is because I think it will undermine support for libraries and I think if we undermine support for libraries and we don't support them in the way that we should I think that will undermine our democracy and I think it will undermine scholarship which of course are not unrelated also and so yes, I think those two snakes waking their way through the grass are worrisome I don't know how to meld the elephant stomping around with snakes but you're better with these metaphors than I am No, I was just thinking of the Mark Twain quote that everybody always talks about the weather but nobody ever does anything about it and John, you're a great example of somebody who is both talking about the environment that we're in and not just remarking upon it but building the actual structures the roles you've played in each of these examples of course something you wouldn't naturally trumpet but you have just been so crucial to all of this and for those reasons it's not just what you're writing about but what you're doing that we're so lucky to have you in the mix and all of the things that you've done for us so if you'll allow us the uncomfortable moment of thanking you for all your hard work Thank you very much, thank you everyone and thank you to the Britain Center and to the Harvard Law School Library for hosting I look forward to seeing you next time, thank you Thank you