Exercises in democracy: building a digital public library

“Most neighborhoods in America have a public library. Now the biggest neighborhood in America, the Internet, wants a library of its own. Last week, Ars attended a conference held by the Digital Public Library of America, a nascent group of intellectuals hoping to put all of America's library holdings online. The DPLA is still in its infancy—there's no official staff, nor is there a finished website where you can access all the books they imagine will be accessible. But if the small handful of volunteers and directors have their way, you'll see all that by April 2013 at the latest. Last week's conference set out to answer a lot of questions. How much content should be centralized, and how much should come from local libraries? How will the Digital Public Library be run? Can an endowment-funded public institution succeed where Google Books has largely failed (a 4,000-word meditation on this topic is offered by Nicholas Carr in MIT's April Technology Review)? As it stands, the DPLA has a couple million dollars in funding from charitable trusts like the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund. The organization is applying for 501(c)3 status this year, and its not hard to imagine it running as an NPR-like entity, with some government funding, some private giving, and a lot of fundraisers. But outside of those details, very little about the Digital Public Library has been decided. ‘We’re still grappling with the fundamental question of what exactly is the DPLA,’ John Palfrey, chair of the organization’s steering committee, admitted. The organization must be a bank of documents, and a vast sea of metadata; an advocate for the people, and a partner with publishing houses; a way to make location irrelevant to library access without giving neighborhoods a reason to cut local library funding. And that will be hard to do... When people hear ‘Digital Public Library,’ many assume a setup like Google Books: a single, searchable hub of books that you can read online, for free. But the DPLA will have to manage expectations on that front. Not only are in-copyright works a huge barrier to entry, but a Digital Public Library will be inextricably tied to local libraries, many of which have their own online collections, often overlapping with other collections. An online library of America will have to strike a balance between giving centralized marching orders, and acting as an organizer of decentralized cooperation. ‘On the one hand would [the DPLA only offer] metadata? No, that’s not going to be satisfying. Or are we trying to build a colossal database? No that’d be too hard,’ Palfrey noted to the audience last Friday. ‘Access to content is crucial to what the DPLA is, and much of the usage will be people coming through local libraries that are using its API. We need something that does change things but doesn’t ignore what the Internet is and how it works.’ Wikimedia was referenced again and again throughout the conference as a potential model for the library. Could the Digital Public Library act as a decentralized national bookshelf, letting institutions and individuals alike contribute to the database? With the right kind of legal checks, it would certainly make amassing a library easier, and an anything-goes model for the library would bypass arguments over the value of any particular work. Palfrey even suggested to the audience that the DPLA fund ‘Scan-ebagoes’—Winnebagoes equipped with scanning devices that tour the country and put local area content online. But the Wikimedia model, where anyone can write or edit entries in the online encyclopedia, could present problems for an organization looking to retain the same credibility as a local library. Several local librarians attended the conference, and voiced concerns over how to incorporate works of local significance and texts published straight to an e-book format, into the national library. The easy answer is that all information should be accessible to anyone who wants it, but some curating might be necessary to make sure every library in America gets on board. Although he stipulated that his answer was speculative, Palfrey told Ars that individuals would not be contributing to the Digital Public Library, at least at the beginning. ‘Libraries have done this for a long time, [appraisal] is not a new problem,’ he said. Similarly, the Scan-ebago idea is brimming with populist appeal, but Google Books is proof that it’s not always as easy as scanning and uploading documents that people want to see online. Publisher Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media played the print industry’s white knight at the DPLA’s conference, explaining to the audience how his company adapted to the prevalence of on-demand information. ‘We’ve insisted from the beginning that our books be DRM free,’ He insisted to applause. Brewster Kahle, another champion of digital (and physical) libraries and the founder of the hosting Internet Archive, suggested that the DPLA buy, say, five electronic copies of an e-book, and digitally lend them out, just like one rents a movie off Amazon or iTunes, which expires in