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By David Rothman

Andrew White Reading Room at CornellCould all this—you’re seeing the Andrew White Reading Room at Cornell’s Uris Library—be in jeopardy someday in the wake of the University’s new deal with Microsoft? Will academic and public libraries unwittingly make themselves obsolete? Although I don’t want to see physical libraries die, it’s the actual service, the purveying of millions of books for free, whether online or off, about which I most worry.

Now If:book is telling of Microsoft’s further inroads into digitization of public domain classics. Copyrighted books will also be fodder for Redmond’s scanners. Until Microsoft and Google commit not just to scanning the books but also to making public domain titles available in usable, mixable and durable formats—and without gotchas—my skepticism will persist. I don’t trust Bill Gates or even the Do No Evil Duo as the ultimate archivists.

Buried and frozen photos

Just look at the damage that Bill Gates has done to photographic research by literally freezing and burying priceless images without digitizing enough of them first. Consider, too, Microsoft’s sorry records in standards, overall, despite some encouraging news on the ODF front. Meanwhile Adobe’s Bill McCoy, not my hero in the e-book format wars but definitely on target in Google’s case correctly wonders about the openness of the Google approach. Just how accessible will the content of Google and Microsoft be to the search engines of their respective rivals, in the end (a concern that if:book and I also share in abundance)?

The library world to an extent—let’s remember that librarians work with limited budgets—should blame itself for the Google Gates. The ongoing Mooglization of America’s libraries is somewhat like the eternal U.S. occupation of Iraq, with better-organized and richer people imposing their will on the natives. Librarians are territorial creatures just like the feuding ethnic groups in Iraq, and now these tendencies could be their undoing to one extent or another if the Mooglization persists without adequate checks.

The worst No TeleRead scenario

We’re headed toward the worst No TeleRead scenario. Back as the early 1990s I was calling for a well-stocked national digital library system that was truly distributed, not run by the Big Brothers in Washington, and addressing last-mile issues including e-book hardware. First some information gurus said TeleRead was technically impossible. Now such visions seem to have been neglected by various librarycrats in favor of a rush into the arms of Moogle. Sensibly the Iraqis, who once greeted the Americans as heroes in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s fall, now hate our guts and correctly see our President and Vice President as oil-fixated torturers. When will certain librarians be more wary of Moogle and draw a few parallels from America’s greed-propelled takeover of Iraq?

I know. The Duo and Bill have at least some good motives, and there is also hope, such as in Google’s promoting the develpment of good open source scanning software. We’re not talking about all black; I certainly hold Google and Microsoft in much higher regard than I do the Chaney White House, and in fact I even own a few Google shares. But maybe not forever if Google does not shape up. If Moogle truly cared about the public domain, both companies would quickly make at least some public books available in a variety of formats rather than locking them up, as seems to be the present case with Google and very likely with Microsoft.

The archive-format routine

The way things look now, I suspect that Microsoft and Google will use their “public” domain efforts as leverage in e-book standards battles, with an emphasis on proprietary approaches, although I would love to be proven wrong. The peacockish IDPF continues to stretch out its feathers at every opportunity, acting as if Microsoft has vanished from the face of the earth; but meanwhile billg’s boys are quietly doing standards their way—with no evident intention of coming around to the IDPF vision (not that the IDPF is sure-fire, especially with major questions abounding about the willingness of Adobe and the rest to do DRM standards for real). If you mix archival initiatives with Microsoft’s proprietary formats and Google’s very possible use of a homegrown format, just as Amazon is blending its retail and Mobipocket sides, you can see that vendor power over librarians will be growing, not declining. Libraries should undertake their own digitization initiatives, not rely on Moogle and the rest. Moogle is Carnegie not.

The Google boys may not have spent time working out a World View of philanthropy, but at least so far they have not tried to pass themselves off as Andrew Carnegie, the way Bill Gates has. And come to think of it, librarians cannot feel completely secure even if the Gates vision overlaps completely with Carnegie’s. The actual Carnegie apparently felt God had anointed him as a controller of great wealth. In a review of David Nasaw’s new Carnegie biography, Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post wrote:

Carnegie formulated a “gospel of wealth,” relying heavily on Spencer, that rebutted “protests against the unequal distribution of wealth by arguing that the common good was best served by allowing men like himself to accumulate and retain huge fortunes. The more wealth that landed in wise hands, the more that could be given away–wisely—by the retired capitalist acting ‘as trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.’ “

By that way of thinking, Gates and the Google Boys are more qualified to preserve the public domain—yes, a form of wealth—than librarians are. And sadly, if librarians continue to act like Kurds and rivals, they will prove Gates to be right.

(Photo via Creative Commons licensing and Flickr.)

 
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