On Library 2.0
Laura Cohen writes about Academic Libraries and Books: A Good Thing.
Laura is concerned about what coming information changes will affect libraries, and how libraries can best support communities and users.
Couple of items Laura doesn’t mention in today’s vision of how people use a library, is the vast number of books and periodicals the library provides. And all without battering the user over copyright issues. If anything, the ‘information age’ is being perverted by copyright, patent, and DRM perverts. Where I can walk into the Ponca City Public Library and look at the books on carpentry, browse through several books to see if anything on the shelf has the material I am looking for — an online resource imposes copyright limitations before I can browse the contents. I see this conflict, of copyright ‘protection’ in the market place as opposed to the traditional library ‘availability’ of books , as the greatest single obstacle libraries will have to address over softcopy holdings. If libraries cannot overcome the Internet-style hodgepodge of restrictions and limitations, they will likely not provide enough service to flourish in an electronic information age.
But then, I believe the current bizarre mess over extended patents and copyrights to be a serious threat to national security. Too many works are withheld for too long.
Currently there are many old books. Where Laura quotes ‘The point is not that the book is a printed monograph. The point is that it has content. ‘ This is only true in certain circumstances. The printed monograph is a complete document. The author, publisher, copyright statement, and extent of the contents are explicitly present. Transformed to softcopy, some means must be devised to associate these aspects of the work with the content. A Google or other search may turn up content, and either maliciously or inadvertantly omit or conceal related information. Plagiarism is a vastly different threat in softcopy — a hardcopy document can be copied, but not at the speed and efficiency that soft copy can be reproduced or stolen.
I can check out a book, carry it with me to read in bed, at the table, or in the car. Softcopy can also be read in various places, but today those places are different. If an electronic document is available online, then I require a terminal or other device. Few electronic devices are constructed with centuries of experience for ease of reading a document. That means the content and the book are not the same thing, to me. The book provides certain conveniences and assurances. I can browse the book and detect censored (missing) pages, additional pages inserted after publishing, or possibly visual cues are sufficient to identify substituted pages. That cannot be accomplished in a reliable fashion with electronic documents. Or rather, each feature could be protected, but would require trust that protection and availability systems are intact and functional. An electronic document will always be much more susceptible to covert censorship and other tampering.
Tampering aside, there is talk about converting many documents to electronic documents. What I haven’t heard mention was how the conversion is to be certified. That is, who will evaluate and sign for the accuracy of the transform, who will review actual translation errors against expected translation errors, who will proofread and who will compare the product against the original? Where translation engines translate text, do diagrams and graphics get correctly placed to convey the actual content of the original?
Then there is the age of some of the existing printed books. How many electronic storage formats have existed even 60 years? How many times do we expect to re-translate electronic documents? And where do we store these electronic documents for reliable long-term availability. It is grand to say we will convert 20 years of technical journals to electronic storage, freeing up yards of shelf space. But how much will decay of media, and bit transfer failures, affect the integrity of the stored data?
Will we have a Library of Congress registration for every printed monograph translated to electronic form? Provenence will be more important for electronic documents than for printed documents, because of the risk of tampering or deterioration at electronic speeds. How will that be handled?
I look forward to Library 2.0 as a community resource. Hopefully the trust and integrity of today’s printed works collections will be preserved.