It's Time for a National Digital-Library System - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Americans have yet to reach a consensus on the characteristics of our own national digital library. Questions abound. Should the system exist mainly to promote literature and culture in general? Or should the library care equally about the promulgation of scientific, technological, mathematical, and medical knowledge—in fact, even business and vocational material, so that it can help millions of jobless Americans and others upgrade their skills? What are the ways to justify the cost of building a national digital-library system? Could the same tablet computers optimized for reading also be used for filing forms electronically and in other ways reduce the costs of paperwork? How can we resolve legal issues surrounding the dread topic, copyright?...Tom Peters, a veteran public-library advocate, is coordinator of LibraryCity.org, a new online ad hoc group that will seek to deal with these matters, especially whether the national digital library should be mainly for the intellectual elite or also serve the rest of society in many directly practical ways. Peters is a former director of the Center for Library Initiatives of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of the Big Ten universities plus the University of Chicago. I am co-founder of LibraryCity, and like Peters, I hope that Darnton and others will agree with the idea of a genuine public library rich in content and services for the nonelite as well as the elite...."