The Library Without Walls Already Exists

Robert Darnton wonders:

Can we cre­ate a National Digital Library? That is, a com­pre­hen­sive library of dig­i­tized books that will be eas­ily acces­si­ble to the gen­eral pub­lic. Simple as it sounds, the ques­tion is extra­or­di­nar­ily com­plex. It involves issues that con­cern the nature of the library to be built, the tech­no­log­i­cal dif­fi­cul­ties of design­ing it, the legal obsta­cles to get­ting it off the ground, the finan­cial costs of con­struct­ing and main­tain­ing it, and the polit­i­cal prob­lems of mobi­liz­ing sup­port for it.

As you can see, Mr. Darnton takes into account the exis­tence of numer­ous tech­ni­cal and legal dif­fi­cul­ties to attain­ing his goal but he fur­ther notes that sev­eral American and European exam­ples show that these obsta­cles are not insurmountable:

Every research library has devel­oped dig­i­tal projects, some of them on a very large scale. And libraries have coop­er­ated with one another and with out­side agen­cies in all sorts of ini­tia­tives that could be use­ful and instruc­tive in the cre­ation of a National Digital Library. Think of the HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, the Knowledge Commons Initiative, the California Digital Library, the Digital Library Federation, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, and other non­profit enter­prises. They have opened many routes toward what could be a com­mon goal.

Moreover, we can learn from the expe­ri­ence of other coun­tries. Virtually every devel­oped coun­try has launched some kind of national dig­i­tal library, and many devel­op­ing coun­tries are doing the same. They have worked through all sorts of prob­lems and have arrived at viable solu­tions. If they have not come up with one model that fits coun­tries of all sizes, they have demon­strated that the idea of a national dig­i­tal library can be put into prac­tice. It is not just true but tried.

On the one hand, the idea seems just beau­ti­ful. Public access to mil­lions of books for both US cit­i­zens and for­eign­ers, works of lit­er­a­ture pre­served in dig­i­tal form, effec­tively pre­vent­ing them from being destroyed or lost. On the other hand, I do not think this is how this should be approached. We already have exten­sive dig­i­tal libraries at our dis­posal, from gen­eral ones like The Internet Archive, stor­ing cul­tural works in all forms and from all domains of knowl­edge, to more spe­cial­ized ini­tia­tives like Library of Economics and Liberty. Their con­tent can be down­loaded at no cost and with­out spe­cial con­di­tions, save the obvi­ous need to be con­nected to the Internet. But that is not everything.

There is another library of sorts but it is of a dif­fer­ent kind. It is com­pletely decen­tral­ized, run by vol­un­teers, hack­ers and ordi­nary users. It stores movies, books, music, video games. It is con­stantly chang­ing its form and no one has the power to effec­tively end its oper­a­tions. Most of it con­sists of ille­gally acquired copy­righted works, copies of which are being made in thou­sands every day, via P2P net­works, Bit Torrent clients and every other form of file shar­ing. Yes, this is against the law in most coun­tries. Yes, it has a strong dis­rup­tive (which may be a pos­i­tive thing) influ­ence on entrenched inter­est of con­tent indus­tries that want to pre­serve their sta­tus quo and would do any­thing to stop it. But regard­less of the eth­i­cal or legal sta­tus of illicit file-sharing, what it does at its very core is cre­at­ing an unbe­liev­ably effi­cient archive of our cul­tural her­itage. It is already there, it is expand­ing its oper­a­tions through indi­vid­ual deci­sions of mil­lions of file shar­ers and right now, despite all the efforts of gov­ern­ments and copy­right hold­ers, noth­ing seems to be able to stop it.

Instead of fight­ing piracy, maybe embrac­ing it and treat­ing it as a tool for preser­va­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion would be a bet­ter option. From purely tech­ni­cal point of view P2P net­works are the most effi­cient way of doing what libraries are sup­posed to do. What we need is not just another national and cen­tral­ized insti­tu­tion but a rad­i­cal shift in the way we think about the prob­lem. It is not about money or tech­nol­ogy, but rather about cur­rent busi­ness mod­els based on sell­ing copies of cul­tural con­tent and all the leg­is­la­tion that is cre­ated to sup­port them. They, in turn, are arti­facts of our mind­set and the sooner we change it, the closer we will be to cre­at­ing some­thing that more than ful­fills Mr. Darnton’s vision, although in a form com­pletely dif­fer­ent from what he proposed.