We’ve talked about the ridiculousness of Google approaching university libraries about digitizing their books and what an enormous copyright violation that is.
But here’s something else I wonder. Have the libraries really thought this through?
Every week, we get a report from Google that shows us how many hits and to which books those hits are attributed we’ve gotten from our books that are in one of their programs. Since the start of the fall semester, we’ve seen massive increases in the numbers of hits our books have received. It seems as if people are finally aware that you can search books and even read chunks of them online.
Right now, we need libraries to select and collect books we otherwise couldn’t afford that are considered important in their fields.
If all books exist in a searchable format online and, if Google can either instantly make the text available or point readers to where the text would be instantly available, what becomes of libraries?
Are they reduced to books with problematic permissions, art books, and rare books?
Do librarians become untethered from buildings?
Do we search in seedy parts of town, in cramped offices, to find ex-librarians who have the knowledge and skillsets to do searches that we’re not capable or comfortable doing? Will they spend their days drinking and calling women “broads” and “dames”? Smoking cigarettes and nursing hangovers, remembering how it used to be in their glory days on the force?
Will future writers write “librarian noir”?
And, if so, will those books ever make their way into a physical library?
Tiny Cat Pants 
Librarians, forward-thinking ones with resources, anyway, are already untethered from buildings. Sure, I work in a library building all day. But I also have had as part of my job to go on rounds with clinical teams to gather their questions for things they simply don’t have the time or skills to search for, but are needed for their patient care. Two clinical units send me their questions directly through the electronic medical record system. I send them back summary packets – of the state of the literature and the strengths, weaknesses and relevance of the citations I’ve selected – electronically.
Some librarians do still see their skills as the collecting of materials, and that is useful in making sure all of the non-free things are available in full. But it’s not a “warehousing” job. Many librarians see their role as educational (teaching you how to find things) or as having “the knowledge and skillsets to do searches that we’re not capable or comfortable doing.” Those skills might not be as important to you if you just need something fun to read on the beach. If you need to prove to your IRB that you’ve found all of the relevant evidence and you’re not going to accidentally kill a patient because you didn’t bother to look at the older literature that’s still only in print (as happened at a major medical center), an expert in information retrieval is more important to you.
And you’ve hit on something with “librarian noir” – it is a bit like detective work. And not everybody has the skills to be a good detective, has the intellectual curiosity or persistence, or has the time. As it is with librarianship. And journalism. And other professions.
There’s a growing body of information available online. A good librarian exists to help you find what is relevant and what is of quality. And also the occasional chocolate cinnamon chili cake recipe.
And, of course, even if every book in the world gets digitized, you’re still going to have a bunch of people who prefer print. My mom, for instance, can’t read much more than a page or so of a book on a computer screen before her eyes hurt. And while both my dad and I spend ridiculous amounts of time in front of screens, we both prefer print books to their online counterparts in general.
I predict that digitization will largely affect the “what’s out there” level of research – people will google what they want, and if it’s a page or two, they’ll print it out and go with that. But for more in-depth research, especially higher-level academia, I think people will write down the name and go to a library to see if they can find it. Printing out 500 page books is tedious, uses a lot of paper and ink, and gets bloody expensive if you’re in a lab. Not to mention the part where it annoys everyone who gets queued behind you for that printer, or makes a mess on the floor/desk/shelf where your home printer is parked, when the cat decides the growing sheaf is a threat.
And, of course, there’s the issue of thought styles. I really love internet searching when I know what I’m looking for…. but hate it when I don’t. There’s something very comforting about going to a building full of books, then wandering around looking at all of them and hoping that one sparks something. (There’s something even more comforting about walking up to someone whose job it is to help with this, describing a bunch of vague things, and having them point out what you need, right where you need it.)
While online resources can certainly duplicate the salient features of physical libraries (you could have all the books sorted by Dewey Decimal system, with the covers displayed and a mouse-over giving you the text on the back, and inside covers displayed on clickthrough, for instance… possibly with a “see random page” fundtion for those of us who like to flip through a book to see if the writing matches the description), by and large, that doesn’t seem to be the way things are going. It doesn’t match the strengths of the medium, and it could quickly fall prey to the weaknesses. (I can skim dozens of books in a flick of the eye when they’re on a shelf…. the loading time alone of a page that visual would cancel out any benefit you might get from arranging them that way onscreen. And what are you going to do for people with slow connections, vision problems, poor memories, or no printers? Any good system would have to take all of that into effect, and that’s going to be hell on coding… which in turn will slow loading time, which will make people less likely to use the system..)
And of course there’s the good old Digital Divide. Even Google can’t bridge that. Not everyone has a computer, and it’s going to be a long time before one can effectively make that the case. And going to a library to Google books to read on the computer seems…. silly. (Unless the library doesn’t have the book, which is another issue altogether.) Even for those that have computers, not everyone is comfortable using them or has the knowledge to use them effectively. Even for people who are really good at computers. My google-fu is strong, but Breviloquence’s is relatively weak. While I might be comfortable with Zotero and a searchable database for research, he’d be pretty bloody lost if he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for to start with.
So… yeah. I think digitization poses a significant threat to certain aspects of the knowledge industry that we’ve got going on. It’s a problem for publishers, it’s a problem for libraries, it’s a problem for writers…. but I don’t think it’s a catastrophe for any of them. (Okay, maybe for the writers… mostly because writers have a history of being shafted in pretty much everything. But there is absolutely no reason it has to be that way. The model would pretty easily allow for writers to get a cut of whatever money is flowing, if people were willing to give it up.) I think the issue is not obsolescence but adaptation…. what will we become when we can do things this way in addition to that way?
There’s something even more comforting about walking up to someone whose job it is to help with this, describing a bunch of vague things, and having them point out what you need, right where you need it. Aww, Mag, that is one of my very favorite things to do. :)
*grins* Mine too! I’m no librarian, but I do like being a problem-solver.
Libraries, especially university libraries, were thinking about these issues and in the case of university libraries, digitizing their collections long before the Google project came on the scene.
See, but this is exactly why we need to reform the copyright laws. University libraries KNOW that they have no legal right to make digital copies of books that are still under copyright protection.
But it’s also complete bullshit that things stay under copyright for, basically, the rest of eternity at the moment.
We need to have a set period of time, a reasonable set period of time (life of author and 25 years or life of author or 100 years from date of creation or whatever), in which the author or his/her contracted representative gets to decide who produces copies of the text and after that, anyone can make any copies they want in whatever way they want.
I’m kind of torn, then. On the one hand, I think what Google is doing is total bullshit. Any lawyer that thinks a library can give Google permission to make an electronic copy of a book under copyright is really thinking wishfully. On the other hand, I would LOVE it if the courts ruled in Google’s favor–that if finding the copyright holder of a work is too complicated, it’s not really under copyright, just because it might make the big boys more responsive when we’re trying to get permissions.
I’d love to be able to be like “Well, Disney ignored my request to use this image of Mickey Mouse, so I guess Mickey Mouse isn’t under copyright any more!”
Reform would be good, yes. I wonder though…. how would we make this sexy? Because most people don’t know about it (I know I didn’t until you started posting about it), and even when they do hear about it, “lets reform copyright law” isn’t exactly something that screams “lets work hard to piss off industry heavyweights and go up against teams of lawyers big enough to reenact the Battle for Middle Earth.”
To your average image-stealing, book-googling, music-downloading person,* it doesn’t really matter whether Disney now owns their soul or the estate of some long-dead guy should have gotten .0035¢ because they used 30 seconds of a song written by him and covered by 14 bands before they used it in the background of their latest YouTubed Machinima clip. If a book is free to read at the library and it’s free to read online, who cares?
And, as you rightly point out, if there’s no practical way for people to actually do anything about copyright stuff, and the logic of it is murky at best** (who do you track down? how far back does that chain extend? If someone holds copyright on something and grants permission for someone else to use part of it for their work (say, a melody that gets used to make a song), and then that person grants the rights to a third person (the song used in a movie), and you want to do something with that, how many of them do you have to notify? The first person might not agree with your eventual use.), then… why should you bother to pursue any of it?
So… yeah. I really, really don’t like the method Google is using to push this through. It’s a touch too ‘we can do whatever we want, neener neener neener’ for me. But I can’t say that I disagree with the logic. Information should be easy to find. Digitization has some great benefits. And our current system is really, really broken. And, whether any of us particularly likes it, Google is one of the few companies that currently have the resources, wherewithal, and (relative) moral high ground to seriously get things changed.
* I’ll cop to all three of those at one point or another, though the images were for private viewing and archiving, the books were posted by their authors free of charge, and I paid for the music that was produced in a way I was sure the money would go to the artists.
** I don’t necessarily mean that the rules are hard to find, or that they don’t follow a logical scheme… I mean that they’re easy to find and understand in roughly the same way the tax code is easy to find and understand. Which is to say, having them in front of you, even explained in lay terms, will often not help you to answer the question of what you, specifically, should be doing right now.
I mean that they’re easy to find and understand in roughly the same way the tax code is easy to find and understand. Which is to say, having them in front of you, even explained in lay terms, will often not help you to answer the question of what you, specifically, should be doing right now.
The longer I’m in this game, the more I’m certain that copyright lawyers LIKE having the law be murky and untranslatable. It guarantees them work at either the front end or the back end.
I read a lot of copyright attorneys’ blogs on a daily basis. I guess that makes me a masochist.
(who do you track down? how far back does that chain extend? If someone holds copyright on something and grants permission for someone else to use part of it for their work (say, a melody that gets used to make a song), and then that person grants the rights to a third person (the song used in a movie), and you want to do something with that, how many of them do you have to notify? The first person might not agree with your eventual use.), then… why should you bother to pursue any of it?
Aha. That one is simple. The only permissions holder is the creator of the original work. The “melody used to make a song” person has absolutely no right of permission for that piece.
You should bother to pursue it because people who create their work own that work as much as people who buy a car own that car.
I agree with Kat – there is a lot of wiggle room in copyright law, room for the lawyers to say, “Yes, that use met provisions x, y, and z, but we think they went overboard on a, so…” It *could* be a tighter law. It isn’t.