Libraries in Pursuit of Enlightenment | Guest column by Wayne Bivens-Tatum
To realize the Enlightenment ideal of a universal digital library, librarians and their professional organizations must lobby for genuine copyright reform Wayne Bivens-Tatum, Princeton University, NJJan 06, 2011
What is the ultimate goal of American libraries? That question has persistently nagged at me since library school, and I've become convinced the answer for 21st century libraries lies in the 18th century intellectual and cultural movement known as the Enlightenment. Indeed, a universal library universally accessible—like the recently proposed National Digital Public Library—would be the culmination of Enlightenment in the domain of information and the apotheosis of American libraries. But to realize the potential of such a project, librarians and our professional organizations must lobby for genuine copyright reform in order to preserve the public good libraries serve.
Enlightenment underpinnings
The scientific and political principles of the Enlightenment provide a philosophical foundation for modern American libraries, and these principles allow us to articulate an ultimate goal for libraries. Enlightenment principles encourage us to consider anything a topic for investigation, to create new knowledge through our investigations and experiments, to publish that knowledge freely, and to disseminate it widely to provide the knowledge necessary for educated citizens in a free, democratic society. For a century or more, with the advent of research universities and the flowering of the public library movement, American libraries have played a crucial role in this scientific and political enterprise by collecting, organizing, and disseminating information as freely and widely as possible.
To perfect this mission, the ultimate goal of American libraries would be a universal library available to all, and indeed such a universal library has been an enlightened dream from Gabriel Naudé's Advice on Establishing a Library in the 17th century to Google in the 21st. "Google's mission," they tell us, "is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That has been the overriding mission of modern libraries for 200 years.
Copyright blocking progress
Until now, libraries and other information providers have done an admirable job of making such a universal library a reality to the extent possible. Contrary to popular opinion, not everything is on the Internet or accessible through Google, but the efforts of various Internet information providers have produced a remarkable world of knowledge. The Making of America, the Internet Archive, Google Books, Project Gutenberg, and hundreds of other digitization projects have placed significant portions of our past at our fingertips. Even before the Internet, American libraries worked together to build a robust system of information sharing through system-wide borrowing and interlibrary loan, so robust that users of a typical academic library have a free pass to read just about any book they would ever wish to read. Though ILL isn't always free to users in public libraries, they too participate, spreading access to information and the benefits of knowledge widely in our democratic society.
And yet, the free-ranging offerings on the Internet and the highly coordinated system of library acquisitions and interlibrary borrowing don't go far enough toward the possible Enlightenment goal for libraries, and their further development is hindered by intellectual property rights of recent origin. Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the right "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Despite no evidence that the sciences or arts were failing to progress, the end of the last millennium witnessed the passage by Congress of both the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the combination of which significantly extended the date range and format restrictions on what people could do with books, music, computer software, and every other print or digital medium.
These acts did much to protect the interest of Disney and other major copyright holders, but did nothing to protect the public good by promoting the progress of the sciences or the useful arts. Draconian copyright restrictions prevent the digitization and free dissemination of a lot of information to the benefit of nobody at all. Combined with the movement of most library materials to digital media, digital rights could effectively destroy even the robust interlibrary loan system that has made American libraries such an effective cooperative.
These legal restrictions, rather than the enormous sums necessary to realize a universal library, are the major obstacles to one of the boldest calls to emerge from American libraries since Melvil Dewey said, "Hey, why don't we found a library association?"
A call to action
Recently, Harvard Librarian Robert Darnton has called for a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), parallel to the digital libraries being created by other countries. Such a library would probably not contain books currently for sale, but would ideally contain public domain books as well as those "from the problematic period 1923-1964." It would subordinate "private profit to the public good and [provide] everyone with access to a commonwealth of culture," just as American libraries have been doing for 200 years. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard has announced a meeting of possible stakeholders in early 2011 to begin discussing the possibility of such a digital library. Given that libraries contain much more than books, I would love to see a DPLA contain music and film holdings as well.
Though he might consider my description of the Enlightenment simplistic, I believe it is no accident that Darnton himself is a scholar of the Enlightenment era, and that he is partly influenced by the Enlightenment dream of a universal library available to all. For decades, American libraries have championed the idea that the free citizens of a democratic republic need free access to information, and a universal library would fulfill this need. Even though no digital library would ever be truly universal, a great deal could be accomplished if the legal as well as the financial difficulties were removed.
Librarians and their professional organizations should take up the call for a Digital Public Library of America, which necessarily means calling for copyright reform that actually promotes the progress of the arts and sciences and protects the public good. Article IV of the ALA "Code of Ethics" states that, "We respect intellectual property rights and advocate balance between the interests of information users and rights holders." But that doesn't go far enough when intellectual property rights are so far removed from the public good.
In addition, ALA could add the DPLA and its concomitant copyright reform to their advocacy projects regarding access to information, and could lobby Washington for support. A digital public library including publicly funded research combined with wide broadband access would provide more access to information than most currently have. Large academic and public libraries could cooperate together to supplement the digitization progress Google has already made. Even Google would probably help, if they could throw in some ads.
We are a tenth of the way through our new century. Halfway through, what will we see? Information totally restricted by corporate demands with no thought of the public good? Libraries unable to perform even the functions they do now? Access to information and knowledge a privilege of the successful rather than a pathway to success? Or do we want to see a nearly universal library universally available to enlighten the citizens of free democratic society? What we see forty years from now depends on what we do today.
Wayne Bivens-Tatum is the Philosophy and Religion Librarian at Princeton University. His Academic Librarian blog can be found at academiclibrarian.net, and he can be reached at rbivens@princeton.edu
