Role of librarians

[Karl Beiser]

> 
> This rings a bell -- Alan and I, at the first Roundtable in Multimedia
> (1990), debated this very issue.  He seemed to suggest that it would be
> very easy to put libraries on-line:
> 
> "Do the arithmetic for the Santa Monica Public Library... Thirty of
> Toshiba's PC-based optical character recognition products, which parse the
> page and can recognize fine text and identify columns, could put the entire
> Santa Monica Library on-line in less than a year and a half."
> 
> My argument that was even if you did that, it would't be useful without a
> great deal more work to organize the digitized information so that it would
> be useful; Alan argued that the only obstacle was the lack of a willingness
> to spend money to digitize the books.

Absolutely. 

But Kay's reported suggestion totally ignores the most fundamental 
obstacle -- copyright.  Most of the really interesting stuff in the 
Santa Monica library represents physical instances of intellectual 
property owned by a multitude of publishers and authors -- very few 
of whom have heretofore come forward offering gratis permission to 
make their work available in electronic form.  If the question is 
money, then the technology constitutes the smaller part of the 
invoice.  Purchasing rights will be far more expensive.

I've seen arguments that postulate the nationalization of publishing, 
the total reconstitution of society, and similar remedies several 
light years out from reality, but not much else.   I think we are 
likely to see widespread availability of popular periodicals on a 
microcharge basis, and with less certainty some degree of 
availability of non-fiction on a pay-to-download approach, before the 
conundrum of clearing the copyright hurdle.

Just MHO...

 
Karl Beiser                         Maine State Library
beiser at saturn.caps.maine.edu        POB 2145 Bangor, ME 04402 
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