 Good afternoon, people. I'm David Thorburn, director of the Communications Forum. I'd like to welcome you to a forum we've been thinking about and planning for a long time. And I'm very happy that it has finally been realized. One of the forum's primary constituencies has always been archivists and librarians, and not by accident, I think, because the transformations that our culture is undergoing now because of the consequences of many changes and especially, of course, digital technologies bears upon the library community perhaps more profoundly than even then it bears on the larger university or on other institutions in our culture. Both the problems and the promise of digital technologies for librarians are surely daunting and dizzying. And we have a very distinguished trio of librarians and cultural historians to talk to us about aspects of this question today. Our first speaker, let me explain the format, will be slightly different from what we might call the conventional or the normal communications forum event, which is broadly a conversation amongst the panelists after which, for about 45 minutes or an hour after which we ask the audience to take part. And as is often the case, the audience participation section is often the one that generates the most remarkable controversy and often the most remarkable insights, and I'm counting on this audience to do its usual brilliant job. But today's forum will be slightly different. I've asked each panelist to make a brief 10-minute presentation about an aspect of the topic that we're confronting after which the panelists and I will engage in a brief conversation amongst the panelists about that. Then we'll go on to the second statement, same thing, then to the third. And when that's concluded in about, I hope, 45 minutes or at most 50 or 55 minutes, we will open the conversation to discourse from the audience. Let me remind people in the audience that it's important for them to come forward and speak at these microphones, in part because, as you know, we do a video transcript, not a good term for this, we haven't invented a new one yet, of each event, both a video and an audio transcript are posted on the website and a text summary. Not a full transcript, but a text summary is also posted. That will be true for this forum. And partly for that reason, if you don't come to the microphone and try to speak from the audience, the camera can't see you. And if you're not speaking into the microphone, the audio can't pick you up. So it's important to help in that way. Our three speakers, I won't go into detail about any of them. I'm sure many of them all are known to you or should be known to you. Robert Darten, who was a university professor at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Libraries, will speak first. I won't run through his astonishing curriculum, Wittei, which I'm sure is known to many of you, but I assume most of you realize that in his, I guess that he wouldn't think of it as two separate careers, although I sometimes do. He, after an enormously distinguished career as a historian, especially of the early modern period, often focused on the history of the book and the consequences of books, he, to the surprise of many of us, left his job as a professor at Princeton and came to Harvard to head their library. But his tenure as the head librarian of Harvard has, of course, been a very interesting one, and it's also the one in which he, along with some other people, initiated the Digital Public Library of America project, and that's one of the things we'll be talking about and that Bob will address. So Bob will speak first. And then second, Anne Wolpert, who has served in a very distinguished way for a number of years as the head of, as the director of libraries at Harvard and is also one of the people who oversees the MIT Press and is the chairman, chairs the board of directors of technology review. She will speak second and will address some related questions having to do with the new digital dispensation. And Bob will talk about the Digital Public Library of America and related issues and will address certain aspects of the problem of copyright and other aspects of the problems library faces because of complexities in the copyright law. And Susan Flannery, who was the director of libraries for the city of Cambridge and the past president of the Massachusetts Library Association will speak third and she will address broadly the kinds of questions that are faced by public libraries which are often very different and in some ways even more pressing than the kinds of problems that are faced by university libraries or specialized archives. So I'm delighted to introduce all three of these speakers and to turn the podium or you can stay seated actually turn the conversation over to Bob Darten. Well, thank you, David. It's great to be here. Can you all hear me? This doesn't seem to be on. Can you hear me okay? If not, raise your hand. I should explain that for the last two years I feel like a missionary for this thing we call the Digital Public Library of America. And I tend to get carried away by the splendor of it all, the way missionaries sometimes do and it sounds utopian. In fact, it is utopian. I think one of the great things about this country is the utopian explosion that occurred with the American Revolution. There is a utopian vision to the enlightenment which inspired our founding fathers. That is that knowledge should be available to everyone and that a republic really could only thrive if the citizenry is on the floor. Because the camera- It sounds great, but what I want to do is instead of waxing rhetorical and utopian to adopt another tone which would be, well in a way it would correspond to another aspect of American civilization, the pragmatic, the can-do tone, something that's much more down to earth. And I'd like to begin with Anne's permission and Susan's permission by invoking something rather surprising, namely the dark side of the history of libraries. Because you tend to think of it as this wonderful upward trajectory leading to more and more access to our cultural heritage. In actual fact, libraries often have been closed in even the great library of Alexandria. We don't know much about it but it certainly was not a place that was just open to the public. It allowed in a few scholars but basically it was a place to keep books for the glory of the Ptolemaic dynasty. And the same is true, I could go on and on citing other examples but instead I'd like to show you some rather facetious slides about how libraries have kept people out. Including the great libraries of Oxford which it so happens is where I did my graduate work. Oxford, for those of you who have visited it as you would know, is a series of colleges that are surrounded by gigantic walls, 10 to 15 feet high with spikes and bits of shard glass at the top. My college, St. John's, had especially high walls. It's door slammed shut at 10 o'clock at night when I was a student and if you were outside the college, too bad for you. You had to climb the walls but the walls were covered with spikes. So here you see a photograph of me and a friend who's pushing me up where I was trying to climb between a row of fixed and revolving spikes because this was my favorite entry point into my college. And I did it in very stages of inebriation over two years. Live to tell the tale but everyone did this. There was a kind of folklore attached to it. The point is that these great colleges of Oxford, many of which go back before the invention or reinvention of movable type, all kept their intellectual riches inside spikes, walls, the rest of it. Here's a photograph of the great university library, the Bodleian. And you see it's got spikes in the foreground, granulations in the background. And in general, the public is kept out. They get to look through bars at the intellectual riches on the inside. But basically the place is closed to the public and has been for about 700 years. So they're not very inviting. And I've had great fun asking friends to just go around photographing these walls which are covered with spikes, still are. It looks a little amusing today but it's for real. These places were kept, worked to keep the public out, to keep the books in and used for this highly privileged elite who were the students and the faculty of Oxford. So you get the idea, I could go on and on. And instead I would like to point toward a happy ending, the Boston Public Library which was the first really large public library open to the public in this country which even from 1848 on allowed people to take books home. So it was a kind of breakthrough that reversed this trend towards exclusivity. I think it's motto over the main door is truly inspiring and we are trying to extend that democratization of access of knowledge, breaking down the walls through the digital public library of America. So I will stop the slides at this point and make it very quick because I have about seven minutes more and I don't want to slow things down. I'll give you a very quick overview of the DPLA. First may I ask, how many of you have know what the DPLA is if you would raise your hands? Well, most of you do. So I won't go into a lot of esoteric detail. Just very briefly on October 1st, 2010, a group of people gathered at Harvard to discuss the possibility, which was really a page and a half of indifferent prose that I had circulated among them, the possibility of creating a digital library that would be available to everyone in the country, even everyone in the world eventually, and that would be free, that would be open access. It sounded far-fetched, but the people who came, there were about 40 to this meeting at Harvard included foundation leaders, leaders of some libraries and computer experts. Within about 30 minutes, we all agreed it was a good idea and we could make it happen because we could find the money. The point was to get the foundations to create a sort of coalition in which they would together come up with the required costs. The libraries would create a coalition to come up with the books and we set to work. We named a secretariat in the Berkman Center at Harvard. It developed a staff of two and a half. It's now expanded to eight. Staff administered in a very diligent way the first steps towards something that I think could be a gigantic national library, all of it as a distributed system for the entire country. We named six working groups. They're scattered all over the country. They're dealing with particular problems, including the problem that Anne is about to discuss, namely copyright. So I won't insist too much on that, but believe it or not, it's our biggest problem. And the five others are discussing things such as technological infrastructure, governance, finance, the intended public for this, the content and scope of the holdings of this digital library, and so on. I could run over those real fast, if you like, or maybe we could leave that for your questions and see what you find most interesting in all of them. But going very rapidly, I now have about four minutes left, I should explain that we've had large plenary meetings over the last two years on the West Coast, the East Coast, Chicago. These working groups have expanded and expanded, so there are now about 1,200 people, all volunteers working hard on these separate aspects of what will be a very large organization, and we're organized. You might say, who appointed you to do this particular task? And the answer is, nobody. We just decided we would try to do it ourselves. But this phase of getting things started is now coming to an end. We are creating a 501C3 corporation with a proper Board of Trustees and bylaws, and so on. We are searching for an executive director, so if any of you are interested in the job, let me know. We want someone terrific who's willing to take risks and be totally committed to what is one of the most exciting jobs I think imaginable, and we will have headquarters somewhere. We haven't quite decided yet. Maybe Boston, maybe Chicago, maybe San Francisco, but you shouldn't imagine the DPLA as some kind of grand structure with a dome on top of it and a gigantic database underneath. No, it will be, as I said, a distributed system that will create an interlocking series set of relations among all of the great research libraries and a lot of the small public libraries because public libraries are absolutely crucial to what we are about. That takes me to the subject of who is this intended for? What kind of an audience will it be and what holdings will the DPLA make available to this audience? Essentially, I think you should not think of it as a system for college professors, people like many of us. In fact, in a way, it's a pity that it began at Harvard because there is a sort of Harvard stigma. People think this is just for the high-brow elite. That's not the case at all. I think that there are lots of people scattered through the country whose brows may be high, but they aren't members of these privileged institutions where knowledge has been walled away from them. So it's aimed at a very broad public, including schools K through 12, especially community colleges. There are about 14 million students in community colleges in this country, more than exist in four-year colleges and universities. Many of the community colleges don't have adequate libraries at all, so this, I think, will be a tremendous boom to them, but it's also aimed at just people scattered all over the place in old age homes and wherever they might be who are interested in knowing more and even enjoying more, having a deeper experience as readers. The finances, well, we've had wonderful grants so far. We've got enough money lined up to get us to our launch, which is next April 18th, April 18th, just around the corner, and we are quite confident that we can raise enough money to get the Digital Public Library of America going and keep it going for a certain amount of time. At first, and this is why I'm trying to sound pragmatic and not utopian, it will not include 20 or 30 million volumes. Instead, at first, it will make available the choices items from the great research collections of our country, collections that have already been digitized. Harvard announced today that it would make available to the DPLA its finest collections that are already in digital form and I could give you some examples of these, but we have worked hard to make this happen. And the point is that users of this DPLA, wherever they may be, will have instant one click access to all of this material. Material is going to be coming in from all of the great research libraries and it will expand. I've got one minute more, according to my timing, and I would like to emphasize the democratic character of this library because we don't imagine it as something highly centralized from which from on high the information will flow. No, it will be a series of lateral horizontal relationships and it's meant to reach people at, forgive the expression, the grassroots. So we imagine scanner bagels, sort of Winnebago type trucks that will go out and help small public libraries scan their holders. We want to help librarians in small towns or in branch libraries and cities to get the people in their community to arrive with stuff from their attics about the civil war or their family history and then to get it digitized, to get the metadata organized correctly so it can be integrated in a national system, but then to help curate it and to make it part of the intellectual life of that particular community. So our ambitions are large, but the beginning is small. It's all workable and we think that we've linked, we've solved the great problems of technology, of finance, of organization, of figuring out the scope and content of things and of governance, but we haven't figured out the problems of copyright. So I'm eager to discuss these, got one or two points to make, but I think this is where I should turn the floor over to Ann who's going to solve this problem for us, aren't you, Anne? The transition was so fluent and graceful that I think we should postpone our conversation together until each of you speak, so go ahead, Ann. I think of emerging ecology of digital content. It's quite a robust, increasingly robust ecology of initiatives that are coming really spontaneously as happened with the Digital Public Library of America. Spontaneously, digital initiatives at scale are coming out of the American library community. They are fundamentally reshaping, I think, as the Digital Public Library is, the way the United States and the component parts, the mission-based parts of the United States that are charged with keeping the cultural record of this country and the research record of this country. So it's not just cultural, it's not just historical. It's also the records of research and culture and history and everything that we keep and want to keep about this country and what goes on in it. These initiatives are developing in real time and they're all learning from one another. I mean, Bob talked about the fundamental architecture of the Digital Public Library of America, which is organized around a distributed model. Some of these initiatives are distributed, some of them are centralized, and I'll talk about a few of those in a minute, but they are developing in real time. People are sharing information about what works and what doesn't work, and it's a very interesting place in time where the willing who have established agreements and arrangements and understandings with one another over the past 20 years of dealing with this environment are now moving those relationships and what we know about what it takes to keep and use digital content, moving these into real-time experiments and real-time systems that really I think as the Digital Public Library is, are gonna transform the way this country manages its research and cultural archive. And these are enabled fairly recently, within the last five years, most I would say, by the state of the network, the scale of the network, the robustness of the network, all of a sudden we can imagine exchanging large quantities of information, we can imagine a distributed system where you don't have to bring everything centrally, but you can in fact link to things that are remotely located because the network is now big enough and robust enough and reliable enough so that you can build a system on a distributed model instead of having to consolidate. And we also have come to understand that the problems that are presented by preserving digital objects in a variety of media. Digital objects are unbelievably complicated. We're not just talking here about text digitized standard formats, we're talking about video, we're talking about audio, we're talking about simulations, we're talking about all kinds of time-based digital objects that need to be preserved, we're talking about things that have been digitized as well as things that were born digital. Thank you. So the scale of the challenge associated with figuring out how to keep these digital objects and the amount of research that's required and the structure that's required to do this is really driving this whole environment. So there are a set of national scale digital projects that are underway at the moment. The Digital Public Library of America, of course, being one of the first and foremost of them, I think Bob really led the way in some very important ways, not just in terms of the design of the DPLA and putting the momentum behind the DPLA, but also because of his familiarity with the Google Book project. Because that digitizing process taught the American Library community a great deal about what it would mean to entrust the cultural record and the record of research to a commercial enterprise. From those learnings, real-time learnings, which go on even as we speak, the settlement happened just a couple of weeks ago, so out of these initiatives have come something called Hottie Trust. How many of you have ever heard of Hottie Trust? Do you know what Hottie Trust is of? Yeah, good, good. So Hottie Trust is a partnership of research libraries, mostly comprised initially of the digital versions that libraries received as a result of participating in the Google Book Digitization Project. The partners came together and they made a commitment to preserve those files, preserve those digital objects. No one had any confidence that Google would do it. Google digitized these works for business purposes, not to keep them as an archive for posterity, and we thought it would be tragic if all of those files, all of that effort, all the work that the libraries contributed, all the effort that Google put into it were to evaporate because there was no permanent commitment to preserving those files. So that's what Hottie Trust is, and now additional works are coming into it. Pornopolis came out of the San Diego Supercomputer. It's a consortium of groups that are focused primarily on data and image preservation. Very interesting initiative, national and scale. The Digital Preservation Network is something we're very involved with here at MIT. It is an effort to build a national preservation network, dark archive, if you will, of all of the digital works that universities believe are worth preserving. It's built on the internet to backbone, and it is a deep, robust commitment to keeping in perpetuity or whatever looks like perpetuity. Digital works that have been acquired and need to be used by universities, and the Academic Preservation Trust is a new initiative which is attempting to consolidate the digitized archives primarily of places like MIT and Harvard and Cambridge Public Libraries. So these are just some examples of the eruption of initiatives that are taking advantage all of a sudden of existing relationships and the power of the network and the capacity of the current networked environment to manage these kinds of things. Some of them are distributed, some of them are consolidated. We will have an opportunity over the next 10 years to see which models work best in which kinds of environments. But it's very, very exciting and very dynamic. Now to copyright. Actually, John Palfrey was to have been here to talk about copyright and to paraphrase a politician. I know John, I'm no John. So I will give you sort of a superficial level on this. I'd like to have mentioned that. Again, I'm glad you mentioned it. Palfrey has been in touch with me. He's promised to return to come to the forum sometime, maybe in the spring or next fall. I'm very sorry he was advertised and didn't show and I'm glad that you're able to speak for him, but he regrets not being here. He's obviously brilliant and very active in this space. But there are those of us who are also working in this space who know things from the school of hard knocks rather than from the academic point of view. So I just want to talk about a little bit about how to build on what Bob was saying, how copyright constrains and confounds what we're trying to do in a digital environment. I don't say this because I think copyright is evil because I don't, it's the law of the land and it is what it is. And it has some very important exceptions. Copyright basically gives to a person who owns the right in a work, control over how it gets used, when it gets used, whether it can be reproduced. But there's some very important exceptions in the law that were carved out to benefit higher education and to recognize the fact that not all uses of a work were what you call consumables. So if you are watching a film that was designed to entertain you for entertainment reasons, then you should pay for it. But if you're watching a film because you're trying to teach a class about the techniques that were used by the filmmaker, you're not watching it for the purpose of being entertained, you're watching it for the purpose of learning something. So the copyright law distinguishes between uses that are non-consumptive and that are for educational purposes, especially not for profit. It also has provisions for transformative uses and that was the reason why Google thought it could digitize all of these books because it was not intending to use those books the way they were originally intended. They were using those books to improve their search engine results. So all of those words got fed into Google's algorithms and their explanation for why they were able to do this was it was a fair use of these copyrighted works on the basis of the fact that the use they were making of them was not as books but as words that would fit into their search algorithms. The copyright law also has some carve-outs for preservation purposes. So if in fact you have a work and it's in copyright but it's severely damaged or has disappeared or you need to make a copy of it before the acid paper falls apart, you can make a copy for preservation purposes and all these things are and of course you can make copies, you can make a transformative use is to make a copy of something for someone who is for example vision impaired or hearing impaired and so on. And of course there are works that are in copyright and that's a lot of what Bob is working with right now or works that are in the public domain. So we are working very hard to make as much appropriate use out of fair use as we can and there have been some very interesting court cases lately that made some progress on that. They will, I'm sure they'll all be appealed to the Supreme Court, but right now there have been lower court affirmations of transformative uses, there have been lower court affirmations of ADA use, there have been lower court endorsements of preservation purposes as being fair use. So we're really for the first time I think feeling pretty encouraged about the fact that the provisions in the law that allow for fair use in fact may be interpreted by the courts in a way that's positive for education and positive for preservation purposes. There are some things that are not fair use, watching a film that was designed for entertainment for entertainment purposes, obviously one of those. We have a very serious case that was argued at the Supreme Court on Monday in the midst of the hurricane in which there is a question about whether works books that were manufactured, that is printed, produced outside the United States actually can be used in a way that in what's called the first sale doctor. Normally if you buy something, if you buy a paperback you can lend it to a friend, you can put it in the shredder, you can resell it, but if you buy an electronic work it's probably gonna come to you under a license or a contract and you can't do some things with that. Recently there was of course a litigation around this issue of first sale that suggests that maybe books that were produced outside the United States may not be able to be lent. So there's a lot of concern about that one. Orphan Works is another big issue. Orphan Works are works that are within copyright but for whom the owner cannot be located and there are many of them. So we're trying to figure out now that we have digital copies of all of those what can be done with Orphan Works and the registrar of copyrights actually has just said that she's just put out a call for comment on Orphan Works. And finally then there's the Google Book Settlement in which the publishers and Google agreed not to argue anymore and both to go make money. So with that. There are some questions that are worth talking about but maybe we'll hold off and we'll go to Susan and then we'll have a quick conversation before we turn to Susan. So far there's been a lot of talk about public but not a lot about public library and I think there is a vast world of difference between the public library and the academic research and archives domain. So I've been asked to talk a little bit about that just to sort of give a groundwork. How many of you actually use a public library? Okay, so you know it's very different from an academic library. The whole sense, the whole vibe. But the purpose of the public library as Bob said is to foster democracy through the creation of an informed citizenry. And that sounds very lofty but the implementation is sometimes messy. Public libraries are as disparate as universities. Some are very well funded and some are not. Some struggle for resources and others don't. And often the libraries that are well funded always say they don't have enough. So the reality is there's the haves, there's the have-nots within any university or any grouping of organizations and public libraries are no different. Public libraries have received a lot of press in the last four or five years questioning their future which was coincidental with the downturn in the economy, the lack of seemingly national willingness to fund public entities, and the re-appearance in a much more stable and vibrant way of the e-reader and e-content. Those two things happened about the same time which raised the national question what is the future of public libraries? Public libraries are cradle to grave organizations. And I like to think that if there's any silver lining that can come out of the tobacco industry it's catch them while they're young and you have them for life. And that's true. The public library's first mission is as a child's door to learning. And every research study that has been done says we knew it now but we know it now more definitively that one to three are the critical educational years for any human being. And if they don't get what they need before they're three years old you can throw a lot of money at it afterwards but you rarely can recoup those critical losses. So in a way the public library has now become almost even more important than the school because if the public library doesn't provide for the intellectual and literacy growth, pre-literacy growth of a child between the ages before the age of three by the time at age five they show up in a kindergarten classroom. Their vocabulary is seriously diminished in comparison to other children and their academic progress is on a trajectory that does not fit with our educational and economic goals for this country. So it's a very, very serious issue. The other role of the public library is independent learning. So for the self-motivated teenager, middle schooler, adult, PhD who wants to try to learn about something outside of a structured classroom the public library is often the place that they do it. A lot happens on the internet now, there's a lot of wonderful resources there but up until about 10 years ago it was the public library was the only game in town. The public library also serves as a community center, a place where people can come together with no other affiliation than they live in the same town to discuss books, to read great books and talk about them, to see films and discuss them, to learn to read and write in English. Those are things that public libraries do that really don't often happen in other places. The other new job that we have taken on which I think parallels our traditional job is helping to bridge the technological divide. Because we all know that certain people have all the bells and whistles and all the gadgets that they need to take advantage of these fabulous resources on the internet and many people do not. And so part of the library's role is to do two things. One is to make that technology available to people at no cost and the other is to try to help them get the skills that they need in order to take advantage of that technology. For tonight's purposes I really wanna speak about what I think a thriving successful public library can do and should do. As I mentioned, I think a big part of their job is to engage children, to get them to be intellectually curious, to give them the building blocks that they need to be lifelong learners. We need to provide services to new immigrants. We need to help people who are non-English speakers or not first language English speakers to develop adult literacy skills. But yes, we even help people who have graduated from American high schools learn how to read and write in English. We help immigrants assimilate into this country. Just last week, Professor Juno Diaz spoke at the Cambridge Public Library and he talked about when he came from the Dominican Republic the only place he felt at home was at the public library. Even though the librarian spoke no Spanish and he spoke no English, she made it very clear to him that that was his place and she was gonna do what she could do to help him move along. And he said that was the defining moment in his life as an American. And that if that hadn't happened, he would not be the person he is today. Those little miracles happen every day in public libraries. From little children to adults who come. We had a woman at the Cambridge Library who was from Pakistan. Her husband had passed away. She was a grandmother. She came to our adult literacy program. She said, I've spent my whole life doing things for other people. I've always wanted to learn to read. I'm now going to do this for myself. And she learned how to read with her grandchildren in tow when she came to meet with her tutor. So these are important things that not to discount the digital public library but these are not the clientele for the digital public library. These are the clientele for the everyday public library in towns of 5,000 and in cities of 500,000. We provide reading materials for pleasure and self edification. We would not fall under the copyright because most of our people do read books and look at our DVDs and listen to our CDs for pleasure, which was their intended purpose. So I don't think we get a free pass on the copyright issue. What are the challenges for public libraries? Funding is a challenge for any organization that is in the education business and I don't care at what level of the hierarchy you're in but often public libraries at the lower end of the hierarchy. And it's interesting to know that some of the best funded public libraries in the United States are libraries where by law the citizens are allowed to vote directly on the library budget. Libraries do very, very well when the citizens appropriate the library budget. They do less well when politicians do. I think it's a pretty interesting thing. The other challenge for us as the funding issues are constant then we have new technologies. And if we are to fulfill our role as helping to bridge the technological divide we often have to ride two or three horses at the same time because as e-books come in we have to acquire them but we are not stopping buying printed books and nobody's gonna say oh you bought less copies of this this year because you have to buy e-books. They're looking for the same thing they had last year and more. We went through this many years ago we bought VHS then we started buying DVDs but we couldn't get rid of the VHS. We had to buy both. Three years ago the Cambridge Public Library stopped buying VHS tapes. We actually got rid of all of ours and you can't believe how many complaints we got. And yet nobody was producing VHS anymore. You could buy a VCR, I mean a DVD player for $35 and yet people still wanted it. So I think that's the challenge for us is as new technology comes on we have to maintain the old we have to integrate the new until we get to a point where the old one drops off but there's always a new one coming down the pike. So that is a huge financial and also in terms of skill set of the staff it's a constant challenge to keep up with all of that. In terms of purchasing things things that are we are buying we have to buy in multiple platforms. So that's a huge problem for us. When we buy an e-book we have to buy it so it goes on a smartphone and an iPhone and a Kindle. We can't just buy one. We have to buy all versions. People get very upset if we can't manage their one type. The other issue I think is licensing agreements which Anne talked about wouldn't it be great if you went on the library website and you could do a search just like you do on Google and you would get every single thing that we own that had those words in it. It's technologically possible but the vendors who sell us the online databases that we buy won't give us permission to do that which makes it very hard for the user because they're used to Google one stop searching and now they come to the library and they have to look in the catalog. They have to look in this database. They have to look in that database. It makes us look old fashioned. It makes us look not customer oriented. The reality is it's pretty much out of our control. Ebooks is a new thing for us. How we're going to buy them. How vendors are going to sell them to us. I think the very future of the idea of the public library is going to hinge on whether we are going to be able to purchase content in the future. Just imagine if the public library in 2013 stopped buying new material and nobody would sell us anything new or they might sell it to us after it was two years old. I think that's a huge, huge problem in that many people will be disenfranchised from new content and I just wanna give you one statistic which I think will illustrate what is true. Most public library users want new things. The books we purchased in the last 12 months went out an average of 6.5 times in the last 12 months. The entire rest of the collection averaged 2.44. So you can see where our users are actually voting. What they want and that's where my concerns with the digital public library comes in. If the only things that are going to be on it are things that have copyright, they're no longer under copyright protection, they're not gonna be the things that the average public library user is looking for. So I think of the digital public library as it's getting formulated, becoming almost a hybrid of a research library and an archives, which I think is a fabulous idea, but I don't really see in the near future anyway and maybe my crystal ball just isn't big or imaginative enough. I don't know how the digital public library could really take on the traditional role of a public library given what we know about the daily realities. Why don't we begin by Bob respond to this last point and one theme that's embedded here in what a number of you have said that I think might be good for us to address before we open it to the audience has to do with this tension between the commercialization of content and what your projects all really stand for because that would also lead us into a fuller discussion of the, I was gonna call it the elephant in the room, but let's call it the Google in the room. Right. Well, I agree with Susan's point. I don't think the digital public library of America can fulfill these roles of a public library, which are absolutely crucial roles. So it's quite true that the users of public libraries tend to be interested in recent material, especially fictional material often when it comes to books, but the same applies to DVDs and other things. So we haven't developed a policy on this yet because there are all kinds of questions that the DPLA will have to resolve. Myself, I advocate what I call a moving wall. I think that assuming we can solve the copyright problems, we should not make available through the DPLA works that were published recently and that could be the last five years, let us say, so that if each year the wall would move up one year, but the DPLA would not get involved in the current commercial circuit and that would minimize its conflict with publishers and authors, but it also would leave the public libraries free to continue with that function and it would supplement them for this person and you call the independent researcher. I get perhaps it was also Ann who emphasized that. There are lots of people, scattered users of public libraries who are not interested in the latest bestseller, but they want lots of information on subjects that make them impassioned. It could be recipes for grits. It could be designing a better submarine. It could be lots of things, but our public is so varied and there's so much talent out there that I think they need access to the entirety of what we can make available to them. So in a way you could argue, and some have argued, we shouldn't call it the digital public library of America, but I think that the public function is the one I mentioned, namely going out and helping public libraries mobilize their communities to develop their own collections about local history or local families or local cultural activities of any kind. Having said that, I think that I'm also on a trustee of the New York Public Library, which has 86 branches and is passionately concerned about libraries at the neighborhood level, which are very threatened. So I was fascinated with your remark that when citizens can vote the budget, they do better than when politicians do, because we organize right ends and all the rest of it to get the councilmen of New York to vote an adequate budget and they never do. It's such a struggle, especially at the level of the branches. So that's what I can offer by way of reply, but I'd like to turn to Ann and the question of copyright. There was, two weeks ago, I think it is now, an extraordinary decision about Hathi Trust. So this decision, which involved a case, a lawsuit against Hathi Trust by the author's guild concerning alleged infringement of copyright, and Hathi Trust defended itself on the grounds of, well, fair use, and it actually stole a leaf from Google's book. So this elephant in the room sometimes can produce very interesting things, namely that if a use was transformative, it was fair. Now, all of my lawyer friends, when I say fair use and then I say transformative uses, roll their eyes. They don't believe it. They say it'll never stand up in court. Well, two weeks ago for the first time, it did stand up in court and in a very powerful way. So these works were not being redesigned as movies, and they weren't even being necessarily used for the classroom. They were being made available to readers, basically within the University of Michigan system, to the visually impaired and so on, but the works themselves, the texts were transformed only in that they moved from a printed copy to a digital copy. That is a gigantic leap forward, and it's a matter of tremendous optimism for those of us who want to democratize access to knowledge. The judge, Judge Baer, said a second thing, and that had to do with something you didn't mention, I think, and namely the threat of market damage. So the Digital Public Library of America will not threaten anyone's market because it will be dealing with works that have been out of print for a long time. It's true that the concept of out of print is in a way anachronistic because any book now can be reproduced through print on demand from a backlist that is electronic. Still, books have a shelf life of new books on sale. In book shops, a shelf life of a few weeks, sometimes a few days. Most books are published and go out of print almost instantly. There's only a tiny number survived more than a year. So it's very interesting, this notion of market damage which is crucial in the court battles that have taken place around copyright. And the latest decision said, if there's no market damage because a book is out of print and it's not being put up for sale, it's being made available freely, then it's fair use. So contrary to what we were thinking just a little while ago, it seems to me that fair use now could be the royal highway through this territory that has been fenced off by copyright and left to the financial interests of those who possess copyrights even though the books aren't being much read. Maybe it would be helpful and maybe you could address this. Maybe it would be helpful to explain why the American copyright law presents us with particular problems and is not the same as elsewhere and how the changes are relatively recent. Well, I'm not sure I can, not being a lawyer at all, let alone an expert in copyright. But I'll answer that and then I wanna speak to this question about what the migration from tangible print formats to digital formats has meant because it's not just the commercialization of these works. It's the privatization because some of these works are now owned by societies or museums or other organizations that you might think of are good guys but maybe they're under financial pressure and maybe they see that once they have digital versions and there is no print version anymore that typically digital works are rented to you. Anybody who has a Kindle knows, you don't really own that book. You have a contractual right to use it in certain ways and those ways are very profoundly different from the ways you can use a print book. You can't share it in the ways you would share a print book. So for places, I started my career in public library so they're deep in my heart and the same applies actually for research libraries like us. As content moves from tangible with the protections, the legal copyright protections, first sale doctrine protections, as things move from that legal environment into an environment where you can't even look at something unless you've signed an agreement that sets the specific terms under which you can use that and maybe this can. This migration is profoundly changing the way people can read and what they can keep and how long things will last and what public libraries can do. I mean, for a place like the MIT libraries for instance, some of the scholarly journals that we now make available in electronic formats have no paper equivalent anymore, none. So we only have the digital version and we have to trust a commercial publisher to make sure that that record of progress in physics is kept in perpetuity because we can't make copies of it ourselves. I mean, it is this underlying framework that's invisible to most people. It's killing public libraries. That seems to me, that was partly I had in mind when I talked about commercial, maybe privatization is an equally good term but it does seem to me that what you're saying, Ann, is that in a way the idea of what a book is and our access to what a book is is profoundly transformed not because of anything inherent in the technology but because of the new rules, regulations and commercial assumptions that lie behind the way in which the technologists are repurposing older texts. And that seems to me a major, major issue that I'm very surprised that there hasn't been more discourse about that as if you can give any book that you have bought to anyone you want. You can lend it to a million people or many people. You can do other things to it. None of those things can you do with an electronic book which essentially is very much more restricted in your way of, it restricts your way of using it in profound ways. Well, I think it's even worse than that actually. And you're alluding to that when you talk. Well, I think what happens is if you buy a subscription to the New York Times online or the Boston Globe or a magazine, if you buy it in hard copy, you buy it, you own it. If you buy it online next year, if you don't buy it, you lose what you paid for the previous year. So it's not as if you say, well, I have the online subscription so now I own that content. I don't keep paying the subscription year after year. I lose all of the historical files as well. Well, no, because you can go to the library. No, I'm talking about the library. And I think Anne's point is a really critical one in terms of the preservation of historical sources of any kind in science, technology, newspapers, whatever. The idea that when a library buys it, they're not buying it to keep it for the future. They are renting it. And once they stop paying rent, it goes away. And I think that's a very serious problem. Aren't there some constrict restrictions that e-book publishers put on the number of times you can lend it out for? Certain ones. And I actually just wanna say that content has always been commercial. This is not a new thing. We always paid for the things we have. Books, magazines, newspapers, whatever. Libraries, consumers have always paid for content. In fact, there's probably more free content available now than there ever was in the history of information. So I think that we just, commerce is not necessarily the enemy, but I think right now we're in uncharted territory. The content creators don't know how to sell it to us in a way that makes sense for them or for us. And I think they're trying to make the new technology fit into the old paradigm and it's not working very well. Or they're trying to create a new one that doesn't work particularly well for our needs. So I think it was Harper Collins was the 26 circulations you pay a certain fee and then after it goes out 26 times you have to buy another one. You know, in principle, if the cost per use was not too exorbitant, it's not a terrible way to do it. As long as you know that if you still have one checkout on it, it's still yours. So then you do get to keep it for posterity and it doesn't get to go. But if the company goes out of business, you're out of luck. So I think for those of us who don't wanna go back to the oral tradition, this is a very important issue that we need to think about in terms of the preservation of culture and information as it becomes non-existent in a tangible way. In fact, I would add it's even worse than that since we're piling on the negativism. Oh my God, this is like the doom and gloom crowd. All right. After the 26 uses of the Harper Collins books they self destruct. And so that's a very good example of the lack of permanence. And if you look at this problem from the point of view of the large publishers, the six biggest publishers, all six except one actually were refusing to sell books or to license books to public libraries. Now you could say that's just bloody mindedness on their part, but in actual fact, you can understand it much as you might regret it because they think if we sell one electronic copy to the Cambridge Public Library, and it can loan that electronic copy out to all of its constituents that's destroying our market. The only thing that works for them is if they're still printing copies which we're still buying. But once they go to all electronic and they lose the library market, I mean just the little Cambridge Public Library spends $800,000 a year on books, multiply that by the 15,000 public libraries, academic libraries, special libraries, the consumer is never gonna make up that difference. So right now, yes, they can have it both ways. They can put it in hard copy and not sell it to us an electronic copy. But I think the days of the printed book are numbered. I think we may get to the printed book on demand, but I think the mass produced printed book I think within the next 10 years is going to be not common. And so I'm worried about what happens there but I think the publishers are right now not looking at a huge market that gives them a steady source of income that will be totally gone to them if they refuse to sell to libraries. We're going to open it up now to the audience. Let me make the transition by asking and you don't have to answer this sort of simple-minded question, but I think it might generate interesting discussion. I'd like to ask each of you to propose, if you're willing to, something that strikes you as among the most promising aspects of our present situation and then the most disturbing, what is among the most disturbing difficulties that we face? I sometimes think, I'm going to move over here so I can see the audience, I sometimes think that I think of librarians as in the middle of a kind of tsunami in which both old and new things are overwhelming them like a gigantic tsunami wave or an avalanche, something of that kind because what I have in mind here is not merely the questions, the tremendously complicated questions that all three of you have just been talking about, but the additional issue of the fact that not only are you responsible as librarians for the entire print heritage, but now you're also responsible for what we must call the digital heritage. That is to say, there's all this new material that only has a digital life that has great cultural importance. Libraries are clearly in some sense the central source for preserving that. And when you couple all of that in with the fact, with what I call the instability of platforms, that is to say the speed with which formats go out and become obsolete in five minutes, and Susan mentioned a couple of examples of that, it seems to me that librarians are faced with what seems an almost impossible task to deal with so many different territories or fields that require preservation and a situation in which access is provided to these things. So I know this is a, so address the tsunami, I guess is what I'm saying. Can I change the analogy? Of course. Cause I don't think of it so much as a tsunami as I do, I think of it as like surfers in Hawaii, right? So a wave comes in and we catch that wave and we try to ride it in without wiping out. And if we survive that, we swim out and the next wave comes and we surf that wave and try not to wipe out. So it's almost, it's true. There are a lot of things happening, but we're trying to ride those waves in a way that serves our constituencies because sometimes we see the waves before the people on the shore do. Just trying to make it, so that's just my little adjustment to your analogy. How about you start? Well, I mean, if I had to simplify things in a struggling to answer a complicated question, I would say that the opposing forces are commercialization and democratization. And to illustrate what I mean by commercialization, I should begin by agreeing. We live in a commercial world. It's not as if we expect things to be available for free, there are real costs everywhere you turn. But it's a question of monopolizing the access to knowledge and exploiting it for commercial profit. I think that the world of knowledge is expanding. If you take just medical science, very powerful here at MIT, the amount of knowledge available measured in articles published in medical journals doubles every three to four years. So the universe of knowledge is growing at an incredible pace, but access to that knowledge is shrinking because research libraries can't afford to buy the journals. And so we've got more and more knowledge and less and less access to it. Commercialization is a threat to the world of knowledge and the flourishing of an intellectual climate. Whereas democratization means the opposite. It seems to me that we have to transform the way commercial publishers publish scholarly journals. Now this is very far away from Susan's backyard, I realize. But I do think that it's something that is an urgent issue that must be resolved very soon. I mean within the next couple of years because we simply cannot go on as we are. And if research libraries like MIT and Harvard have this responsibility to preserve for future generations knowledge, the licensing agreements won't be enough. We're going to have to make sure that we can preserve it in digital repositories and to use all the technology possible to keep those texts alive, complicated business. But I hope MIT will help Harvard cope with a monumental problem. So I'm simplifying things, but I think people do not understand how the commercially driven publishers tend to be monopolistic publishers. And it's not surprising because if you can squeeze more profit by dominating the market, you'll do so. So that's one of my concerns on the negative side. So let me just say things that I'm optimistic about actually. I'm very optimistic about that list of initiatives that I put up. I'm optimistic about the digital public library, creating an environment whereby those materials that do get digitized have a home and visibility because things don't last unless they get used. That's the truth. I mean, it's true of paper that you can put it in a refrigerator and come back and get it. A hundred years later, it'll be in pretty good shape, but bits don't last unless you spin them and use them. So I'm really optimistic about the fact that consortium partnerships are being built among the willing people that do have technical ability, that are committed to seeing these things get preserved, are creating collaborations and partnerships like Hottie Trust, like Deepin, like Duraspace. There are a whole series of things that are going on out there where people are putting their efforts together, not to try to solve them at the individual level of an institution. Understanding that these are big complicated problems and they have to be solved at scale. And so these efforts to solve these problems at scale to me are really promising. And the other thing that I'm optimistic about is open access. Last week was open access week. I think the open access movement has great promise, not so much on the public library side, perhaps, but certainly on the academic side holds great progress for creating a groundswell of resistance to commercialization on the part of the authors because the authors are key to all of this. Really, the authors are the producers and the customers of publishers are authors. They're not me, they're authors because if they can't attract authors then they don't make any money, they don't even have anything to sell. So if you think about the system, this complex system of the production of content, it is the authors who are central to it. So if authors can, we can help authors make wise choices, create environments that support authors in that way. There's the possibility of making some difference, I think. So I actually think there are unimaginable positives to what we have today. The Cambridge Public Library in 1994 became the first library in the world to offer graphical access to the internet. Now, when we did that, there was not one picture on the internet, it was all text. The first pictures we were able to get were the photos that were sent from the Hubble telescope down to Earth. Think of where we are today. Think of all the information that is free, open, some of it crazy and misguided, but it's all out there for the user to judge and evaluate. I think of Wikipedia. You know what an amazing concept that is and how many of us use it on a daily basis to check little things that we used to have to call the library because none of us actually owned encyclopedias at home or very few people did. So we were always calling the library for these facts from the World Almanac. We don't get those calls anymore. People are looking them up on their smartphones and their tablets. That's a great, great thing that technology has brought into all of our lives. In terms of how libraries work, technology has allowed us to cooperate with each other in unbelievable ways. We have the World Catalog now that allows residents of Cambridge or any other community to go online and look at whatever they want and ask for it to be sent from another library. Last year we borrowed over 200,000 items from other communities for our patrons. That's not quite, but it's about 15% of our total use in a year. So it's an astonishing thing that can happen with technology. We're also banding together as networks, as groups of libraries, to buy this e-content and share it. But there are issues with that too about selection. There was a lot of Scuttlebutt in the Minuteman Library when we started buying e-content together that all those Cambridge patrons wanted the sex books. Well, we did buy them, but they were checked out by every community in the network. But it was like, yeah, well, we wouldn't buy that for our small town. It was like, yeah, well, you didn't buy it, but they are checking it out. So there's a little meshing of the goals and... 50 shades of perverication. Exactly, that was exactly it. It was like, oh yeah, no, we wouldn't buy that. It's like, well, we're buying it and then all your people will borrow it. But it's stuff like that that we have to learn to work together. We could never have done this without technology. Think about the library 30 years ago. If you wanted an interlibrary loan, we would say, well, it could take two weeks. It could take six months. We have no idea when this will come in. Now, in most cases, it's here within three days. It's unbelievable. So I think those are the upsides. Those are the wonderful things that we take for granted every day that 20 years ago would have seemed like pie in the sky dreaming. I do think that my grave is concerned about the future is open access in the sense that if the public library is the only access for the average person to current information in whatever form, if the publishers won't sell to us, what does that mean for the public libraries? Unique role in this particular culture. Audience, it's your turn. If you don't ask questions, I will. I'd prefer your, yes. Good. Hi, Susan. We worked together on putting a library on the internet years ago. And you mentioned the notion of working with authors. And that's probably something I've been thinking about a lot lately, welcome comments. Most of what we've talked about is content that has institutional support. Books are published by publishers, libraries by them. University work, theses are typically published by a university library and served by them. But an awful lot of content, probably the majority of content is produced with no institutional support. Everything from personal papers that may eventually make it into a historical collection, maybe. Not locked up on a file system, electronic form. Company papers from small companies. You work for a large corporation, the corporate library, plays very much the same role as an university library. But if you work for a small company, or these days a virtual company that might last for two years, or a project, a consortium, everything from those kinds of papers to blog postings, there is no institutional support that I can tell, other than maybe the Internet Public Library, which scrapes websites. And it strikes me that there is no shelf space. And it occurs to me that this is potentially a role for both public libraries as community archives. And for something like the digital public libraries. What's possibly a funding stream? So I'd welcome comments about how we incorporate all of this advanced content into large-scale. That's a really good question because in days of your, if someone had a set of papers, history of their synagogue or records of the garden club, pick your poison. And it turns out, of course, Bob is gonna correct me, but I've always sort of thought that if you kept anything for a hundred years or 200 years, it became valuable. And it begins to contribute at that point to the history of a place or when things were in paper, you could put them in a shoebox and put them on the back shelf and they'd still be there and someone would find them in a hundred years or 150 years and PhDs would be written. But today, it's like your digital photographs. I'm sure everybody in this room has photographs that they took on a brownie when they were seven years old or that they inherited from their grandfather who loved cameras and photography. How many of you still have digital pictures of your children? Stuff just evaporates so you can't put digital objects in a shoebox. And at the moment, there aren't any shoebox, but there are things like Dropbox. So people have started trusting commercial enterprises to host their precious digital belongings, whether they're related to their institutions or their personal lives. And I don't know how many of you signed up with Kodak a decade ago, but those are gone. So it's just a very challenging space at the moment because there are organizations that are trying to be helpful based on business models that they think can work, but businesses are responsible to their owners and shareholders. And when something starts being a drain instead of an advantage or at least neutral, they have to let go because they're not paid to be social service agencies. They're paid to be businesses. So local archives in some cities and towns are being asked to create environments where people can bring their family photographs. Crowds, I mean, the Library of Congress, for instance, has run a very interesting experiment where they had a huge collection of photographs that were undocumented. And they put them up on Flickr and they put out a crowdsourcing call. They said, will you please, they said to the United States, will you please look at these photographs? Tell us if you recognize any place, person, or thing. Help us understand what these photographs are and where they came from. It's been phenomenal. People write and they say, that's my grandfather standing next to his stew to baker in Waco. I was about 1935. So it's amazing what you can do when you have the capacity to create and maintain these digital objects. But the Library of Congress can't do it all. They're a public library and they're struggling with their own financial challenges. So how we, as a country, as a civilization, how we think about this challenge of how we're going to preserve these digital works. And my hope for the Digital Public Library of America, for instance, is that it will help create mindshare, for lack of a better word, mindshare around the idea that people and groups and communities should start thinking about this and should start imagining solutions to the problem of the ephemeralization of our history. That's exactly what I was thinking of when I said going back to the oral tradition, because if you don't preserve this, it's as if you go back to the time when records were not written down. Well, thank you first for really engaging an interesting conversation that I'm quite intrigued by. One of the things I've been struck by, I'm in a small publishing collective, one of the things I've been struck by in talking to people about e-books is how surprised they often are that they don't actually own the book. You don't own an e-book, it's a licensing agreement. Amazon has certainly shown that, has borne that out, removing books from Kindles and from their own site for various reasons. And one of the things I, in one conversation, I tried to describe it as a metaphor, the e-book license for me is a metaphor something that each of you has touched upon, which is this closing access. The e-book is not a print book, it's not, you can't share it, you can't lend it, you can't copy it. So to me that is the metaphor for this closing access, as our knowledge and information expands, this ecosystem of knowledge and information expands so rapidly. Fewer and fewer of us are able to access it and find it too, which is a different form of access. And all of you going to my question, leading from there to my question, I've heard from all of you an understandable concern about this shrinking access to knowledge and its implications for, among other things, democracy. And each of you is intimately, but particularly Anne and Carolyn, the precarity of the digital book. And then I've heard many times, as I've followed with excitement, news about the DPLA, that there's full confidence that this massive project will be funded. So I'm curious about that because on the other end of the table I hear that libraries are consummately unfundable. It's always a struggle, every election cycle there's a precarity there. So I guess one of my questions is, what do we feel the relationship with entities like the DPLA that are so well resourced before they even really get off the ground to these larger institutions that are charged with protecting our democracy? I mean, what is DPLA, for example, more specifically, what is DPLA's responsibility to the public library system that it is charging itself with supplementing on a material level? Well, how to answer that? Maybe the answer that I'm fumbling with isn't satisfactory. I mean, as I tried to explain, the DPLA will make available to public libraries eventually the totality of our cultural heritage. And so the public library in a town like Cambridge or a smaller town doesn't have to have endless stacks full of printed books. It can at one click make available something that is as great as the Library of Congress. That's a very important contribution. And it's one that I think is not in conflict with the role of the public library to provide current literature. However, that may not satisfy you. And so I would fall back on my second point, that I think the DPLA is committed to energizing and mobilizing the communities that surround public libraries so that they can draw on their own resources, such as the photograph of grandfather by the Studebaker or other things that people have collected and that are meaningful to them in an often quite profound way, but that somehow are not accessible. I think the public library at the local level is where those things should be made accessible and the DPLA can help. It can help and Cambridge is not needed, but in many small libraries it can help the actual scanning, it can help the creation of metadata, it can help the curating of the material produced and it can help in preservation. So these are vital functions, I think, for the DPLA to perform for public libraries. Now this may not answer the fundamental problem that you raised, namely the fleeting nature of so many digital objects and that's what Anne was stressing as well. I think we need to worry a lot about the problem of preservation and the preservation of ephemera because you were talking about ephemera in particular. Ephemera may be ephemeral, but it's certainly important. I mean one thing historians have learned is that by studying ephemera you can understand a great deal about the ordinary lives of ordinary people. That's now a central concern of the historical profession. And yet this digital ephemera is getting lost. A very interesting statistic I came upon recently last year there were about 350,000 new titles printed in this country. That's a lot. 6% more than the previous year so I don't agree actually Susan that the printed book is doomed and won't exist 10 years from now. It's doing very well and it's doing better actually each year. But in addition to these 350,000 books there were 700,000 self-published books in this country published almost always on the internet. So people all over the country have something to say and they can now say it thanks to the internet but will it be preserved? Who is responsible for maintaining these texts which may include a lot of garbage but I think they include a lot of very valuable material as well. I want to just remind us all so I've already disclaimed not being a lawyer while I'm also not an economist but the truth is that things get preserved because there's a business reason to preserve it. So higher education is in a particular kind of business. Public libraries are in a particular kind of business so the MIT libraries and the Harvard libraries are funded by their institutions because there's a fundamental business reason for higher education to want to be able to provide ready easy access to the wealth of knowledge that students need to have to follow their passions and their intellects. So it's a very, very good business reason for MIT and Harvard and every other academic institution to invest in their libraries and some of us happen to have enough resource that we can money on the margins and try to create shared solutions to this big complicated problem which is what some of those initiatives are. The Cambridge Public Library is funded by the City of Cambridge because it is fulfilling important, I don't want to say business, but public purposes, important public purposes. It has a very important claim on the taxpayers' money and I live in Cambridge and I'm happy to fund the Cambridge Public Library. We're going to start here and then come there. Yes, excellent. Wonderful conversation here. I'm not sure my question is answerable here but just out of curiosity, I'm interested in the role of government in all this and I know government flows in and out of this in manifold ways, probably vastly more complicated than anyone can sort, but if you were each to sort the key legislative government-controlled issue or discussion that's taking place at this moment, which would it be? Where is the really key conversation at the legislative level taking place that has to do with the things that you're talking about here? I'll try a quick answer and then pass the ball. One thing that I think we desperately need is legislation concerning in particular orphan books. It's now been proposed by the person in charge, Maria Palanti, in charge of the copyright office. She doesn't have a draft of the legislation but she's agreed that something needs to be done. It's a major problem. Congress can resolve it. There have been two drafts of laws in Congress. Neither got through the legislative mechanism but that would make a tremendous difference to our attempts to make available the cultural heritage of the country and then we could go beyond that and we could talk about legislation that would empower libraries devoted to the public good, not for profit, to collect and make available works with certain restrictions for the public as is being done in Scandinavia. There's a new French copyright law that has many very positive things about it so this is not far-fetched and I think that Congress ought to get on the ball and do it. I think copyright is one of the huge issues that we have to deal with. I think the other is from a legislative point of view. I don't know if we're going to get there but there may be a time where government has to say that to vendors that they can't discriminate against libraries and selling their wares. That they can't say that the e-book costs this but right now I think it's Warner will not sell new release DVDs to public libraries until six months after their release date. Now I think that's a serious concern. It's stepping into treacherous waters in terms of the role of the public library and the public's ability to access information. So I think from a legislative point of view there needs to be some conversation at some point before we get too far down that road where we accept it as the way of doing business that you don't have to sell to certain customers. I think the issue of standards would be great if there was some way that there could be platforms that vendors would agree to use and their content would be unique but the formats would be the same so that libraries don't have to develop 15 different pieces of software to connect this one to this and that to that so that they can serve all users. And then last but not least I think the issue of some provision being put into place that if a vendor of electronic content goes out of business that their content if it is not sold to another vendor has to go into the public domain for some university or some entity like the digital public library to hold that content for posterity. These seem such sensible ideas. Why haven't we embraced them already? Over here. So I just wanted to come back to the I think one of you mentioned authors being really central to the question of the future of libraries and a lot of these questions and in other conversations we've had in this very room and just in this room there's been a lot of about the very nature of authorship changing and just to give an example from another industry whose future is being configured as a result of digital technology if you think about the news industry the question of what is going to be the configuration of professional journalists and citizen journalists and individual commenting on websites etc. And part of what's at stake there is changing or shifting or covering the volume between producer and consumer and it seems like there may be a similar line at stake and I think my question is partly about that and partly about what we could do with that when it comes to libraries. So if you think of libraries as another place where maybe there was not producer and consumer exactly but there are books on the shelves and people who come to get them how might that line be shifted in the future and what sorts of things that we haven't even talked about yet might then become part of the role particularly of the public library I think so I'm thinking would there be more of a community center kind of possibility for a public library and how would you reconfigure the library so that users become more actively involved in some way thinking about the model of consumers being able to be producers themselves of content and the analogy that I'm trying to draw with you is that I mean every library patron becomes an archivist or a librarian in some way Well I don't know I mean I'm trying to envision what it would be but it seems like at the center of this is this question of well if the nature of authorship is changing maybe there is some way in which that could help the library reimagine the very nature of the role that it's playing as well That's a really interesting question and it goes to Bob's point about the number of books that are privately published as opposed to published through commercial channels Who's indexing those other than Google? How do these works get into public consciousness, the intellectual consciousness Many of them are hobby books Obviously are there personal stories that someone just had to get out but I also think that from an author's point of view if you have put the extraordinary effort into producing a book I have learned this from the privilege of working closely with the MIT Press If you publish a book you want a tangible copy of that thing Authors know that bids don't last So they want a tangible copy They want a copy in the Cambridge Public Library and the Harvard Libraries and the MIT Libraries and they want to be able to take their grandchildren in there and say see that's my book, I wrote that because you write for a reason and what it means to an author to say okay we'll do your book digitally and then the first thing the authors say is but will it be here next year let alone 10 years from now it was my life's work Speaking as an author I certainly agree that the tangible physical book as a product of all this flavor matters a lot I've done two electronic books One was a sort of hybrid It was published as a physical book but it had an electronic supplement It was actually about songs street songs in the middle of the 18th century which functioned as newspapers really in an illiterate semi-literate society with a lot of censorship So all of Paris is singing about the new mistress of the king and so on The songs are bawdy, they're funny They spread like wildfire It was fascinating to study but what did they sound like? There are archives that have the musical annotation I went to them and got a friend who is a cabaret singer to record the songs according to the original music and you can hear it online So you're hearing the past not perfectly but you're hearing it and this is a new dimension to historical study Thanks to modern technology So I'm an enthusiast about the possibilities of endless expansion of the way we communicate our research, speaking as a researcher and an author There's a second thing I think that authors want besides this tangible thing and that's readers Authors want readers They want to make money too But you know as I say most authors by far make very little money and very few authors live from their pen Even authors of fiction but basically live in universities that pay them a living wage and then they publish books So there is something called the Authors' Alliance which is about to be launched It's an appeal to authors to make available the rights to their books to open access to the public after a certain amount of time has passed after the market has been exhausted and as I said the market is often exhausted in a few weeks after the book comes out So I think that I agree the nature of authorship is changing along with the surrounding ecology and there are possibilities now I think of satisfying a much larger population of authors doing so in new ways I think there's another way of thinking about answering your question which is not so much to try to make an exact analogy between authors and librarians or authors and library consumers because the analogy is imperfect but something that all three speakers have talked about repeatedly there is another kind of analogy and that's with crowdsourcing or collaboration is the model And it seems to me that one implication of what all three of our speakers have been saying one partial solution to the problems that libraries face are forms of collaboration in which some libraries specialize in some things, some and other things but their materials are available to all users and it's an imperfect analogy too but this notion that a collective may be more powerful than a single individual seems to me to hold for the problems that libraries face as well I don't know if you would agree Bob or Anne if you would think that was true but it's clear from things that you've said that collaboration is essential if these projects are going to succeed that no one single entity would be capable of handling the amount of information that is available or would become available I think public libraries always reinterpret what they're doing with their original mission in line so I think it's very possible that things will morph and we will do things that we're not doing now that we hadn't even thought about 10 years from now we would be doing them I think that's absolutely for sure I think we're getting ready to do sort of a citizen-cutorial kind of project with our local newspaper collection but I think there'll be more opportunities for citizens to contribute data and content to our archives and our website but I think in terms of the authors and books I hate to be the voice of you know, gloom and doom but I think the reality is that the profit margin on e-books is way higher than on printed books and I think the authors are not going to have a lot of say in how the publisher wants to distribute the content so that's why I think books are going to go not because people don't want them per se but because publishers make way more money on the electronic versions the upside to that piece of information is that a long time ago there was what was called the Thor decision which was a very important internal revenue service decision that affected the ability of publishers to keep a backlist of their books and the IRS said that you will be taxed on all the books in your warehouse as assets which gave publishers a built-in incentive to not keep back lists to do very short publishing runs and to remainder things very very quickly I think electronic content and the ability to hold one content electronically and make it available to people after the initial six month burst of energy is actually a positive thing because many librarians have been extremely frustrated by the fact that somebody would come in and ask for a book that is literally not even a year old and it's out of print and I think so e-content has the potential to remedy that situation Jason So I have two sort of related questions that we've touched on a little bit in a specific way that I was hoping One, so I used to work in an archive and one of the fears that the archivist had was that they were afraid that once materials were digitized and they were put online that people would have no incentive to come to the physical space of the archive or the library but having worked with historical objects I think there's certain kinds like rare books for instance in which it's very difficult to capture the material or physical nature of those original objects So I was just wondering if there were certain different standards that you have when you were trying to digitize those objects and trying to capture the physical nature of them or if there's certain objects that you just can't digitize and it'd be very difficult to capture the sort of original nature online and so that's one question and then the second is sort of related to Kelly's question about sort of getting users to participate in libraries I'm interested not so much in them participating in sort of giving content, contributing content but how they contribute metadata so I'm wondering if there's like a sort of crowdsourced metadata model that any of the projects you worked on or have heard of have been thinking about Well maybe I should address the archive side of things I mean I agree with both of your points and I do know people who run archives and are worried that they will no longer have visitors and researchers but people I think don't understand the extent of the archives we have at Harvard 400 million 400 million objects in manuscript they're not about to be digitized I've spent a lot of time working in the Archive Nacional in Paris and was once even allowed to walk through the stacks it's unimaginably vast I mean these archives will never be read for generations and that's just the National Archives in Paris but all of the departmental archives the municipal archives and there is paper going out there forever that has not been seen by a human being in 200, 300, 400 years and then there's a lot of parchment as well so it's an illusion I think to say oh well everything is online these days only a tiny fraction of a fraction of what there is is available online but now the other part of your question was it was about the sort of crowdsourced tagging or the folks' onemies why don't I pass on that I'm an enthusiast about metadata that would meet certain standards but to which people could add things however it could be that Anne has other ideas I would say first of all about the archives question that visits is the wrong metric you know that's like saying judge the performance of a car by the color of its bumpers or something you know is a metric that derives historically from a physical world but the other way to think about digitizing is that it puts in front of it's a fabulous marketing device for example depending on how you do it and it also puts the archives content in front of people who would never have visited in the first place and always when archives are digitized and put up they just get tremendous traffic so if you know if you're counting noses that walk through the door then you're wasting an incredible opportunity to fulfill your mission more robustly and richly by digitizing things and that in turn will bring qualified researchers into look at the deeper richer materials that you have but it also saves wear and tear on the original so assuming that you have something that's really famous or a collection that's famous if you put them out there for people to look at online not only will you be marketing them then they'll be exposed to a larger audience but it does save wear and tear on the original so you know a lot of good reasons to digitize but you got to get your metrics right for that to work a lot of libraries are experimenting with crowdsourcing photographs being a very good example of that we ran a little experiment in the MIT libraries we have a film collection and we put it up and we asked MIT students to comment on the films do you want to recommend this? did you like it? has there been anything else? so if that's a little more of a recommender system then you want to make a system per se but a lot of libraries are starting to experiment with using the power of the community to get feedback on collections and participate but photographs are one where a very well known example of where libraries are putting up some asking for help with the metadata I have to agree in 100% my interest is getting information in people's hands and if the paradigm switches that it's online and not through the doorway then that works for me just fine I don't have any problem with that I do want to say we have slightly less than 4 million items in our archives collection just a little bit and we are just starting with a company in New Zealand we are putting we have actually put up our historical local newspapers we are allowing people to go in and correct content that's because of the digital character recognition software sometimes Miss Reads old microfilm so we are allowing people to go in and do that and I think the next step will be photographs and other sort of family treasures if you will being able to put them up on our website with commentary and I think we will probably be using the same company whose name I'm sorry I cannot remember I know all three of you are mostly on the library side of things and I was just wondering if you could speak about in terms of digital access and especially stuff that's born digital like how do you reconcile the archive mandate to keep the original preserved and make sure that what people see is that thing with the library mandate which is make sure that the information is accessible to as many people as possible if I'm understanding your question correctly are you suggesting that there's a possibility we could put content out in its original format and because of the nature of the internet people could change that format so it's more like okay so say there's a really great documentary that aired on PBS or something and you want that to be available speaking completely hypothetically here you want that to be available on a digital library kind of interface or some kind of online interface do you like say that documentary was filmed entirely in high depth video do you just make sure that that video is available and that's it and because that's the original well first of all I'd have to buy it from PBS and so I mean there's lots of things that go into that I guess my question is somewhat about do you feel like how important is it that rather than preserving the file formats and giving people ways to encode those file formats do you like put it up as a YouTube video rather than like come to my site and watch it in whatever oh so there are a couple of things bound up together in your question right so that first of all there's the digital preservation question so and there are several schools have thought about that one is that you should preserve all the original equipment all the original software and be able to produce the thing as it was intended on that Commodore or what you know 20 years from now whatever how primitive HD right exactly so there's one theory that says you have to do a lot well that seems pretty unrealistic for you so then there's another theory that says well okay so what you have to do is create a way to emulate what the object was in whatever formats happened to be available in the future so you see that a lot with a lot of experimentation going on in the space was video games because they you know they move so quickly and technology is pretty fancy much more so than Pac-Man so there's a lot of work actually technical work complicated technical work going on around this sort of underlying question about what does it mean to preserve something that relies on that was built on a particular kind of hardware a particular kind of operating system with a particular kind of software system and maybe user interface and content and how do you push that forward and people and that costs money every time you produce something re-emulated move it forward onto a new platform the software environment you have to invest in it so there's a saying in preservation circles that every time you make a decision to preserve something you've essentially made a decision to buy it again so there's that whole question and then there's the question of how much responsibility to the creators of content the author question how much responsibility do the creators of content have to be mindful of what they're creating and what the shelf life of that work might be so when we started up dSpace at MIT which is our digital preservation archive we published a list of the kinds of things we thought we could take care of the things that we thought we could manage bits moving forward and the kinds of things that people needed to be aware building a proprietary environment building in their own customized environment we weren't making any commitments about the fact that we might not so there are filmmakers and video game makers and all kinds of people out there doing fabulous creative things and there's a kind of school of thought that you hear sometimes which is I am brilliant and I do this in the best possible way and somebody should those are my two least favorite words in the whole world is somebody should somebody should figure out how to keep this stuff in perpetuity so that people can enjoy my work so it's complicated because people are creating new things they're not necessarily paying attention to the fact that the shelf life of that might be even shorter than the shelf life of a book that used to get remainder after six months for me so I don't know if that does that even come close to what your question was I mean I worked in America as a student and we had a box that had a Betamax tape in it and our view was like if you want to use it if you really want to look at it you can bring a Betamax player but we're not like it would so I mean it's well there are standards emerging for you know I have a stack of papers in the corner of my desk that I've written about what do you do when you get digital media intangible formats I actually think there should be a library somewhere that agrees to keep this equipment but only one place has to do it so we don't all have to do it because it's really crazy I have a paper on my desk about that too that's an example of this necessity for collaboration I think Betamax just I couldn't I can't resist mentioning that I have a personal archive of early television that is in beta format because it was recommended to me by the MIT technologist and said that's the best system it will never go out of date yes well they were right yes they said it's obviously a superior technology forget about VHS I want to thank this panelist