Robert Darnton talk at Columbia University – “Google, Libraries, and the Digital Future”
Previously we had reported on this talk, “Google, Libraries, and the Digital Future”, and I asked if any of our readers could attend and report back. Well, many thanks to Peter Meyers who did attend and wrote up a precis of Darnton’s talk. Peter Meyers is the associate publisher of the Missing Manual series at O’Reilly Media and here is his report:
Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University Library, spoke at Columbia University last night on “Google, Libraries, and the Digital Future”. While much of his talk rehashed the by now familiar (at least to Teleread regulars) Google Books settlement and next month’s ruling, the most interesting part of his speech concerned the future of university libraries in the Age of Google. He was surprisingly, albeit cautiously, optimistic.
To begin with, despite his grave concerns about Google’s monopoly over a large portion of the world’s books, he seems resigned to a ruling next month in favor of the firm. To be sure, he presented a list of wished for elements in the judge’s ruling–ranging from the plausible (ongoing monitoring of prices for non-free titles in Google Books) to the admittedly utopian (turning the entire collection into a national digital library). But I sensed an undercurrent of resignation from Darnton that suggests he isn’t holding his breath. And I should also mention that he gave a nod to the great public service that a thriving Google Books could provide, especially to people who don’t have access on a regular basis to big libraries like those at Columbia and Harvard. After covering the topic of Google, Darnton went on to address the night’s big question: in a world where 10 million or so titles are available online, what role is there for large scale university and research libraries? Here’s where there’s some encouraging news. Darnton envisions a vibrant and important future for these institutions…if they can get a few things right:
Focus on the special collections they own, continue to grow them, digitize them, and share them with the rest of the world–for free. He mentioned at Harvard unique collections on subjects ranging from botany to zoology, from medicine to Ukranian history. All of these, he made clear, would never be part of Google’s storehouse of information, at least on his watch; instead, Harvard plans to make these available to the public and Darnton encouraged other universities and large libraries to do the same.
Continue to capture and freely distribute as much of the unique intellectual property that these libraries and universities create on an ongoing basis. At Harvard that approach was bolstered by a recent vote by the faculty to make all future scholarly articles written by its members available for free (though they did include an opt-out provision). Similarly, the university is making many of its dissertations, conference proceedings, and lectures also available online.
Develop outreach programs that let the rest of the world know that these unique collections are freely available online.
Band together. That is, big libraries need to recognize that none of them on their own possess collections that are sufficiently unique to draw worldwide interest…but together, if they can figure out things like metadata and catalog interoperability, they can maintain a vital role for themselves, even in a future where GBS thrives.
Solve some serious financial problems they’re facing (one of the most significant being the amount of money libraries spend on subscriptions for academic journals–which run as high as $30,000/year). He’s putting great stock in the rise of so-called open access journals, which are peer reviewed and distribute their articles for free. Should those journals succeed, library budgets would be freed up to spend more on the things that are key to the future of big libraries: concentrating on their special collections, acquiring more printed books (yes, he still believes in those), and preserving more “born digital” works.
The closing Q&A session was peppered with some amusing and informative nuggets:
“Google’s metadata stinks,” Darnton argued, citing instances in which Whitman’s Leaves of Grass had been (at least initially) cataloged under “gardening” and most of Virginia Wolf’s books had publication dates prior to her birth.
“My heart’s with the pirates,” he said, answering a question about the history of piracy. “Almost the entire French Enlightenment was produced through piracy.” (Meaning that much of the way that books were published in Europe during the 18th century was a mad race by a diverse band of publishers to sell pirated copies they’d produced). He did go on to say that as a prolific author in his own right — not to mention as a member of the board of trustees of Oxford University Press — he had great respect and sympathy for the challenges publishers faced today, and wasn’t advocating the abandonment of copyright.
Given the Kindle’s unique and user-controllable pagination method (where passages are marked by Amazon’s “Location 2532 – 2584″, for example) how are scholars supposed to write citations? asked one audience member. “I don’t have an answer,” said Darnton.
He visited Google and was much impressed by the caliber of thinking–if a little concerned by the way that making money informs most of their decision-making. “They’re very nice people,” he said. “They’re all under 30 years old and they don’t sit in chairs; they sit on round balls.”
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Google, Google book settlement, library, Paul Biba, TeleRead
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