Robert Darnton, a historian and head of Harvard’s library system, has an important article in the New York Review of Books, called Google and the Future of Books. It lays the utopian Enlightenment vision of a “Republic of Letters” side by side with the development of the Internet. Darnton explains beautifully how the Enlightenment ideal failed to come about (through professionalization and commercialization of knowledge), and warns that we are about to miss another opportunity because of the settlement hammered out between the publishing industry and Google about copyright issues with the Google Books project. The most poignant passage is the following:

Looking back over the course of digitization from the 1990s, we now can see that we missed a great opportunity. Action by Congress and the Library of Congress or a grand alliance of research libraries supported by a coalition of foundations could have done the job [of digitizing the world’s books and making them available over the Internet] at a feasible cost and designed it in a manner that would have put the public interest first.¬†‚Ķ¬†We could have created a National Digital Library‚Äîthe twenty-first-century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy‚Äîthe control of access to information‚Äîto be determined by private lawsuit.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Open Access, Owning bits—copyright. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.