Digital Public Library of America Launches Today

Digital Public Library of America homepage

Utopian and pragmatic: these are the two poles that Robert Darnton, the eminent historian, Pforzheimer University professor and director of the Harvard University Libraries, identifies as guiding the process he and others dreamt up years ago, then began collaboratively developing two years ago in 2011, and which will come to fruition, when the Digital Public Library of America launches today.

"Háw-che-ke-súg-ga, He Who Kills
the Osages, Chief of the Tribe" (1832)
oil on canvas
George Catlin (1796-1872)
From the Smithsonian Institution

What is the Digital Public Library of America? It will be an online site that will make available to everyone with Internet access large portions of the already-digitized collections of many major American private and public libraries, archives and museums. While Google initially seemed the likely repository for the sorts of materials the DPLA will be hosting, its attempts--unsurprisingly, as a private corporation--to monetize access to the vast array of materials it has scanned in, and court rulings limiting full access to some of these materials, both have come to mean that Google may be a participant down the road, but the organizers of the DPLA have instead found private foundations to underwrite the project, and private and public institutions with extensive, already digitized archives, that they are willing to make available to anyone interested in exploring them.

Is the DPLA only open to people in the USA? Based on Darnton's comments in the New York Review of Books article linked above and what he has previously stated, the portal will be open to everyone able to access US websites. In addition, an immense storehouse of materials from Europe will be available via interconnection with Europeana, a super-aggregator of materials from 27 countries within and sponsored by the European Union. Darnton predicts that within a generation (or two, depending), a much vaster array of the world's materials will be available via the site. I immediately thought of the manuscripts stored in northern Mali that were thought to have been badly damaged when the northern part of that country fell under the sway of radicals who declared it an autonomous country, though it turns out they were not harmed as much as previously conjectured. A digital archive might be one way, alongside better material efforts, to preserve them for humankind.

Darnton appears to see only upsides to this effort, and I agree that it suggests to potentially extraordinary possibilities for knowledge preservation and production. I sincerely hope, however, that it also does not become an excuse, or the excuse, for financially strapped private and public institutions, organizations and governments of all kinds to eliminate or continue to gut physical libraries.  DPLA should be a complement and supplement, not a substitute or replacement, for the libraries we have, which deserve our fullest public and private support.

Now please excuse me while I go check out the DPLA.

Darnton's The Library: 3 Jeremiads + Brathwaite's Elegguas + National Book Foundation's New Reading Prize

Last spring I checked out from the university's library the esteemed Enlightenment historian and (Harvard University) librarian Robert Darnton's The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009) to gauge his arguments about the present and future state of the world of books and literature for my own edification and to preview it for a class. Darnton, one of the most important figures in his fields, has a gift for subtle argumentation and narration, and I ended up skimming the book, which replicated in longer and more polished form a number of the essays he has been publishing along these same lines in the New York Review of Books, for the last several years. Many concern the role of the computer behemoth Google, and its relationship to the publishing and library worlds, and he has also made a passionate case in the pages of the NYR for a national (which would also be an international) digital library, drawing from the resources of private libraries like the one he heads, public ones like the unmatched Library of Congress, and the trove of 7 million and counting books that Google has already scanned in, with the cooperation of institutions like Harvard and the New York Public Library, but also against the wishes of some publishers and authors, who successfully prosecuted a lawsuit to gain compensation from Google for copyright infringement.

In the current issue of the NYR, in "The Library: Three Jeremiads," Darnton returns to the arguments he has made before, but this time with a trio of "jeremiads," as he calls them, concerning three pressing economic and resource-related issues that American research libraries face which also negatively affect scholarly publishing; universities and college library collections, along with those of public libraries; library patrons, which is to say, readers; and, to a degree not yet fully understood, the humanities, intellectual life, and knowledge production themselves. The first two of Darnton's jeremiad's focus on the exorbitant cost and terms, verging on extortion, of subscriptions to scholarly journals, especially in the sciences, relative to other kinds of texts, which has forced libraries to cut their purchase of scholarly monographs, thus harming libraries' budgets and university presses' bottom lines. Over the longer haul, this economic problem, juxtaposed with constrained university and research library budgets, threatens the sustainability of the academic research enterprise as a whole.  To give a sense of the astronomical prices charged by some publishers, information about which many professors are completely unaware and which have far exceeded the cost of inflation, the chemistry journal Tetrahedron costs $39,082 per year, while The Journal of Comparative Neurology costs $27,465 per year, and both, like many journals from a given publisher, must be purchased in bundles, with high kill fees to end subscriptions for specific journals and so forth. Humanities and social science journals total less per year but are still high and part of this system, with the result that the average cost in 2009 of a US journal title was $2,031 and $4,753 for a non-US title, and that year the journal publishing giant Elsevier made $1.1 billion in profits.  Moreover, there is little transparency in this system, according to Darnton, giving the journal publishers an advantage over libraries, which, for the sake of the scholars they serve, cannot opt out.

Scholars and librarians have attempted to respond, with mixed reuslts.  In the case of the Mellon Foundation-funded Gutenberg-e program, which sought to publish digital monographs of award-winning PhD dissertations in scholarly areas under greatest threat, the potential was great but it did not work out as planned, and the project is now defunct; in the case of digital, open-access scientific journals, there has been some success after scientists at University of California-Berkeley and Stanford circulated a petition in 2001 calling for colleagues to patronize only these journals. The publisher BioMed Central, according to Darnton, has shown since 1999 that this model can work. But the larger question of the effects on libraries and particularly on the humanities and social sciences remains. Darnton had been holding out hope for the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), founded this year, would lead universities towards the open-access model in terms of publishing, and also subsidize authors who could not get grants or subvention money from their home institutions, with the texts ultimately available in both digital and print form via the Espresso Book Machine, about which I've written on here. But, and this is the core of his third jeremiad, there loometh Google.