How to get a TeleRead-style national digital library system started in the U.S., one that could inspire similar efforts elsewhere?
One of the best hopes lies in the Digital Promise legislation—passed on July 31 by the U.S. House and Senate, and expected to be signed by President Bush in just days.
The project will establish a National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies. It’s to be a nonprofit with nine directors chosen by the secretary of education from congressionally recommended nominees. Funds for fiscal year 2009 could reach $50 million for the center if its backers are successful on Capitol Hill.
TeleRead-friendly language in legislation
Now here’s a PDF where things really get interesting: “The purpose of the Center shall be to support a comprehensive research and development program to harness the increasing capacity of advanced information and digital technologies to improve all levels of learning and education, formal and informal, in order to provide Americans with the knowledge and skills needed to compete in the global economy.”
Notice the language? “Formal and informal.” Perhaps that could pave the way for public-library-related activities, as well as school-related ones.
The e-book angle
The legislation also mentions the support of “research to improve education, teaching, and learning that is in the public interest, but that is determined unlikely to be undertaken entirely with private funds.”
Hmm. I’m happy to see money ahead for, perhaps, educational video games and the like. But what about the optimal use of tech to spread around e-books? Issues abound. How to encourage their use, for example—especially since recreational reading can help the school-and-work-related varieties?
And what might be the best business models to use with public libraries, school libraries and others?
Or how about the right e-book technologies? Best ergonomics for first-graders vs. high school students and above? Or older adults, including senior citizens? The One Laptop Per Child project, just going by the tiny size of the keys in the XO-1 laptop, acted as if adults didn’t exist and so far has not given us decent e-book software.
Furthermore, how about DRM and e-book standards? Or encouragement of open source readers and creation tools? Or experiments to test various approaches? Or detailed discussion of the types of content the library system should include?
And mechanisms by which e-books and other items can be selected? Just how much control should Washington have? I myself would like to see a decentralized approach, but with provisions to maintain standards and avoid useless pork-barrel-style projects.
Some library-related hope in Newton Minow’s remarks to TeleRead
Let’s hope these issues won’t be just academic—either as discussion or as a funded project. May Digital Promise will take off and care about e-books!
Cochair and cofounder of Digital Promise the advocacy group is Newton Minow, FCC chair under JFK, and in an e-mail interview with the TeleRead, he offered some hope: “A digital library is my greatest dream to be helped by Digital Promise.”
Ideally that won’t just mean e-books and other content. It should also include the fostering of the spread of appropriate hardware for reading them, including, yes, multipurpose devices.
Also, there should be integration of the content with local libraries and schools, including the proper preparation of teachers and students.
Size of the funding
So what would be the size of funding? Final appropriations for fiscal year 2009 won’t happen until early 2009. The amount sought for ’09, as noted earlier, is $50 million.
Ideally that will grow in time, given the size of returns possible through a more literate, better educated workforce—as well as the simple enrichment of life through Digital Promise’s offerings.
A little history
So what’s the history of this Digital Promise idea?
Lyndon Baines Johnson paved the way for DP years ago when he said: “I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge—not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and of storing information that the individual can use.” Follow the “said” link and you’ll even hear LBJ’s voice.
In the evolving TeleRead proposal, first made public in Computerworld on July 6,1992, I offered e-book-related specifics with an emphasis on the idea of a national digital library system blended in with local libraries. But nothing close to TeleRead has happened since then. The Library of Congress does not distribute commercial e-books and textbooks in the massive way I envisioned, even though LOC has fostered laudable preservation-related work with old books. Now, through Digital Promise, maybe the TeleRead ideas will have a chance.
Related: Google Book Search page on Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (MIT Press/ASIS, 1996) where a formal version of the TeleRead proposal—again, ever-evolving—appeared in the final chapter of this information science collection edited by Robin Peek and Greg Newby—yes, the same guy who has contributed so much of his life to Project Gutenberg, where he is now CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. I’d love to see DP-related efforts experiment with citizen-initiated digitization of old books.
