Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile
Pages: 1, 2
Libraries
The bookmobile metaphor is designed to address the library world. To librarians, it says, you can do better. At the bookmobile conference in Columbus, vendors showed off $300,000 bookmobiles with fine oak bookshelves, computer stations, even mobile satellite dishes. Parked far from these budget-breakers, the Internet Bookmobile costs $15,000 tops, plus the cost of a minivan (the Aerostar was bought from a used car lot for under $4,000). To librarians, the Internet Bookmobile says, with a rich public domain, the Net, and inexpensive desktop equipment, you can wildly improve the quality of the services you offer. You can change libraries from expensive buildings with huge storage and retrieval costs, to a place where books are stored online and printed as desired. Libraries can become a place where books are custom-made.
Even more radically, the Bookmobile says, why should libraries buy copies of public-domain works from publishers when they should be freely available online, and paperback copies can be created for $1. In point of fact, why should libraries lend public domain works at all, when they can just give them away?
Beyond all this, librarians can use the Net as a storage facility for special collections, which are not necessarily in book form. A librarian I met in Columbus, for example, explained that her library in rural Pennsylvania is well known for its genealogy collection, with patrons from around the world coming to research their families. A few days before we talked, someone had come in with several boxes of Grange records found in an attic. With such a collection digitized and online, the library improves preservation, increases access, decreases storage and maintenance costs, and frees librarians from spending time retrieving papers.
Even so, not all librarians are embracing the Internet wholeheartedly. The Library of Congress has received $100 million for digital preservation but few works have been digitized. And Michael Hart, creator of Project Gutenberg, tells a story about a meeting he had scheduled with a local librarian to give him a CD of Gutenberg texts. The librarian wasn't available so his assistant met Hart. When Michael told her, "I'm just dropping these books off for him," and handed her the CD, "She went completely ashen. Her eyes had the look of a deer caught in headlights. That's a look I had never seen before and I've never seen since."
Libraries have the budgets and they have the mission to support the digital future, but do they have the will?
Schools
The opportunities at schools are huge. Schools are strapped by budget constraints and dependent on school districts and state boards to provide one-size-fits-all texts. Public schools could benefit immensely from being able to create books for their students.
Consider what happens when Digital Village put laptops in the hands of fourth to eighth graders at the Belle Haven School in East Palo Alto, California. According to the Digital Village project coordinator, computers in the homes result in increased parent-child interaction, increased focus in the classroom, more time spent reading (on screen), increased computer literacy among parents, and a sense among children of their place in larger world, as opposed to their local community.
What impact would putting books as well as computers into students' homes have? One can imagine increased literacy for both kids and adults (adults in inner-city Baltimore read at the fifth-grade level), more parent-child interaction as kids and parents read to each other, and of course, more success in schools as kids more willingly read their own books rather than assigned textbooks or library books they must return--if they can even find books they want to read in the under-financed schools and public libraries (a teacher in Salt Lake who previously worked in poor Chicago neighborhoods told me the public libraries' shelves there were simply bare; the high school we visited in Washington D.C. didn't even have a library).
Technology is cool, but books are not, right? Yet, when the Bookmobile pulled into the school playground, all the kids wanted books, wanted the low-tech thrill of pulling a paper cutter blade, and were thrilled by the simple activity of folding a piece of paper into a little eight-fold booklet. They were thrilled to have the same books that were no doubt gathering dust in the school library.
Schools can implement this technology for a small upfront investment and incidental costs. And the process of creating books can itself be turned into an educational experience for older children. Schools--especially underfunded inner-city schools--are miserably failing our children. They are growing up illiterate, unaware of their potential and their possibilities. Actively exploiting the public domain in the ways the Bookmobile suggests can radically change this.
Commercial
A few presses, such as Dover Books (the clip-art publisher) and Modern Library, have for many years made strong publishing businesses from the public domain. (O'Reilly's signature book covers of animal woodcuts originally came from Dover Books.) But what commercial opportunities does the Bookmobile concept present?
How about packaging the equipment Brewster culled together into a print-on-demand solution? Consider the words of one participant on the Archive's forums: "I would put out the money in a heartbeat, but don't really have a lot of time to spend learning how to set this all up. I live in a small town in Tennessee, and think it would be a wonderful community service."
Imagine not only schools and libraries buying such a solution but also Kinko's and Barnes & Noble. A few people we talked to were so turned on by the idea of creating their own books, they were talking about buying their own printer/binder/cutter setups. Imagine being able to go into Kinko's to print and bind your book, or finding an old gem in a bookstore and scanning, printing, and binding it as a gift for friends. Imagine B&N turning its own imprint of the classics into a print-on-demand service.
Strange to think about, when the debate is often positioned as Silicon Valley versus Hollywood, but Hollywood can be one of the greatest promoters of the public domain by turning public-domain properties into valuable commercial properties. Since The Secret Garden enter the public domain in 1986, more than a dozen properties have been created, including TV movies, books, audio books, and plays, according to Arizona State law professor Dennis Karjala.
Government
Obviously, government is part of the problem, since it was Congress that passed the 1998 law that locked so many works out of the public domain. But there are many aspects of government. The National Science Foundation has given Carnegie Mellon $500,000 for its Million Book Project. They could give many more grants, not only for the MBP, but also to library science programs, to the study of improvements in OCR technology, and so forth.
The Library of Congress can put the digitizing of public-domain works on the fast track.
The Education Department and state Boards of Education can buy the Bookmobile's print-on-demand system and place it in schools, much as what happened with putting the Internet in the schools.
The Archive is donating unlimited storage space for the digital public-domain library. Surely the government can at least match that commitment.
I'm sure other government employees and those who follow government closer than I do can think of additional government programs that could help speed up the digitization of the public domain.
Conclusion
As I've said here, the Bookmobile is a demo of a public domain application. Traveling "on the bus" has brought to my mind a few ideas for other demonstrable applications. It has also made clear that it is critical to get from "demo" to "shipping product." We should turn not only minivans but also schools, libraries, homes, print shops, and bookstores into book publishing and book scanning operations. In this way the value of the public domain becomes tangible and improved. The more that people actually use public domain works, the more likely they are to contribute to it, and to fight for it.
Richard Koman is a freelancer writer and editor based in Sonoma County, California. He works on SiliconValleyWatcher, ZDNet blogs, and is a regular contributor to the O'Reilly Network.
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Showing messages 1 through 7 of 7.
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public domain bookmobile
2002-11-17 19:51:58 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
this sounds like an excellent project that I would like to be a part of in some way. All printed materials of substancial value will be digitized eventually and as far as copyrights it is a gross miscarriage of government protection to expect the copyright to outlive the human creator as if a company could have an intellect independent of an actual person.
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public library budgets
2002-10-24 09:12:18 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
Mr. Koman said, "Libraries have the budgets and they have the mission to support the digital future, but do they have the will? "
Not true. Somehow, everyone has decided that public libraries need to provide public Internet access, digitize materials, run web servers, and all with no additional funding (except the rare soft money) or training.
When you consider that public libraries have been under attack by the Christian right, pay peanuts and are having to answer to city governments that only understand statistics, it is amazing that public libraries do as much as they do. If it were not for dedicated library staff willing to work for a third of what they could get in the corporate world, the entire system would collapse.
Before deciding that libraries have the money to do this, but are just being lazy, go look at a few public library budgets in different parts of the country and in different sized communities. You'll be shocked at how much most libraries do with so little.
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Grass Roots
2002-10-21 15:31:06 popefelix [Reply | View]
It might be helpful if individuals would volunteer to assist in the digitization of public-domain material. You'd want to do this in steps, of course, so as to make sure your volunteers aren't going to ruin anything priceless, and the really rare stuff should probably reserved for institutional staff, or extremely trusted volunteers. It could be done, I think, provided that you have enough volunteers.
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Costs and desirability of digitizing PD books
2002-10-20 21:45:31 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
The two previous thoughtful posts have brought up the issue of the cost of digitizing. Often the "best is the enemy of the good" in that libraries often spend so much on a few items that they can not get much done, and therefore dont do much.
Lets look at it from the other point of view: Students use the net, almost exclusively, for research. the best the culture has to offer is not all on the net. therefore-- lets fix it.
but for how much? digitizing a book can cost as little as $10. really. the Library of Congress just got $100M in new cash (over its usual $450M/year), and must get $75M in match to deal with the problems outlined in a NAS report called LC21. Mike Lesk pointed out to them that that could digitize all the books in the library (26Million). I believe it. Think of it as the human genome type project: you start dumb and some genious figures out how to it faster and cheaper. (but current plans of LC are to do nothing of the sort, but that is another story)
So should we? Yes. This would unleash a tremendous amount of prior published knowledge that would have all sorts of consequences, much of which are unknown. Furthermore it could set the standards for commercial publishing to join in.
The public library system in the US is a $12billion dollar a year industry. Clearly we could spring $100million for a one time project to digitize the past's PD books.
Further problems are the terminally out-of-print. But we can get started with what we have in hand: granting public access to the public domain.
-brewster
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unrealistic goal - digitizing the whole public domain
2002-10-19 17:18:22 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
I share the author's excitement about the opportunities for access to public domain materials that are being facilitated through information and communication technologies such as the Web. His statement that "it is effectively available to the public only to the degree that it is online," however, is both misguided and false. There is and will continue to be a massive body of public domain materials that cannot realistically be digitized.
Scanning, processing, managing and preserving images of paper documents is not a trivial task. If you consider the millions of pieces of paper held by many libraries and archives, it quickly becomes obvious that access, through the Internet, to digitized version of everything is not a realistic goal.
Even more importantly, focusing to closely on such a goal will require such institutions to reallocate resources that are needed for other purposes. Digitization is important and valuable, but it is not the only thing that libraries and archives do, even when it comes to digital materials. I can't imagine that anyone who's ever worked in a library would be willing to admit to the statement: "Libraries have the budgets and they have the mission to support the digital future, but do they have the will?" They have the budgets to address some aspects of the digital future, but this involves tradeoffs.
The recommendation that “the Library of Congress can put the digitizing of public-domain works on the fast track" should be balanced against the needs of institutions like LC to manage the growing body of materials that are “born digital,” i.e. published digitally in the first place. This is a massive undertaking (see: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndiipp/), which could not happen if LC were to decide to channel all of its resources into the digitization of its paper documents.
The Internet Bookmobile is a terrific undertaking, and I laud Brewster Kahle and others for demonstrating the amazing value of such efforts. I also agree that the public domain should be expanded, not contracted. But we should not lose sight of real-world limitations, which librarians and archivists face on a daily basis. Advocates for a rich public domain should recognize that the right to access, copy and distribute analog materials will continue to be a necessity, regardless of whether or not it is feasible to share the materials on the Internet.
- Cal Lee
University of Michigan
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loc and digitizing the public domain
2002-10-19 15:35:46 akb [Reply | View]
The LOC won't do anything to help get the public domain online unless they are given money and bludgeoned repeatedly about the head by Congress. Here's why:
-There is no catalog of public domain works, heck the digital catalog only goes back to 1976.
-LOC charges to do copyright searches through their records. They *do not* record the outcome of these searches as a matter of policy. I have some researcher friends that were told that the staff do keep unofficial records so that they can charge for work that they don't do.
-Look at the LOC website, their digital library is truly pitiful. It appears to have been built around '96 and hasn't grown since then.
-The LOC is so culturally against sharing information it amazes me. Contrast them with the National Archives, they are user friendly for those that want to get information.
Funding for digitization is a real issue. Take a look at saveoursounds.org, LOC and Smithsonian are basically begging for crumbs, $750,000 to digitize sound recordings that are about to crumble with age. I think that nicely shows the state of government's role in digitizing our public domain.
A (big) carrot and (small) stick approach may work.
The stick would be a simple requirement that copyright of older works must be explicitly registered in a publicly accessible database. While hardly onerous on a business intending to disseminate for profit, this would ensure that only documents with a known owner - that actually values them - would be restricted. Presumably "Steamboat Willie" would fall into this category, but the vast bulk of works of unknown history (or considered to have no value) would automatically become public domain.
The carrot would be a tax incentive to place copyrighted works explicitly into the public domain, such as archive.org, in much the same way as paintings are donated to museums today. This should be attractive to publishers who hold copyrighted works with some value, but not enough to make it worth the effort to publish.