August 2012 – Glorious Generalist

Robert Darnton asked in the New York Review of Books blog nearly two years ago: “Can we create a National Digital Library?” ¹ Anyone who recalls reference homework exercises checking bibliographic information for United States imprints versus British or French will certainly remember the United States does not have a national library in the sense of a library that collects all the works of that country and creates a national bibliography ² Certain libraries, such as the Library of Congress, have certain prerogatives for collection and dissemination of standards ³, but there is no one library that creates a national bibliography. Such it was for print, and so it remains even more so for digital. So when Darnton asks that–as he goes on to illuminate further in his article–he is asking a much larger question about libraries in the United States. European and Asian countries have created national digital libraries as part of or in addition to their national print libraries. The question is: if others can do it, why can’t we? Furthermore, why can’t we join those libraries with our national digital library? The DPLA has announced collaboration with Europeana, which has already had notable successes with digitizing content and making it and its metadata freely available. This indicates that we could potentially create a useful worldwide digital library, or at least a North American/European one.The dream of Paul Otlet’s universal bibliography seems once again to be just out of reach.

In this post, I want to examine what the Digital Public Library of America claims to do, and what approaches it is taking. It is still new enough and there are still enough unanswered questions to give any sort of final answer to whether this will actually be the national digital library. Nonetheless, there seems to be enough traction and, perhaps more importantly, funding that we should pay close attention to what is delivered in April 2013.

Can we reach a common vision about the nature of the DPLA?

The planning for the DPLA started in the fall of 2010 when Harvard’s Berkman Center received a grant from the Sloan Foundation to begin planning the project in earnest. The initial idea was to digitize all the materials which it was legal to digitize, and create a platform that would be accessible to all people in the US (or nationally). Google had already proved that it was possible, so it seemed that with many libraries working together it would be concievable to repeat their sucesses, but with solely non-commerical motives ⁴.

The initials stages of planning brought out many different ideas and perspectives about the philosophical and practical components of the DPLA, many of which are still unanswered. The theme of debate that has emerged are whether the DPLA would be a true “public” library, and what in fact ought to be in such a library. David Rothman argues that the DPLA as described by Darnton would be a wonderful tool for making humanities research easy and viable for more people, but would not solve the problems of making popular e-books accessible through libraries or getting students up-to-date textbooks. The latter two aims are much more challenging than getting access to public domain or academic materials because a lot more money is at stake ⁵.

One of the projects for the Audience and Content workstream is to figure out how average Americans might actually use a digital public library of America. One of the potential use cases is a student who can just use DPLA to write a whole paper on the Iriquois Nations. Teachers and librarians posted some questions about this in the comments, including questioning whether it is appropriate to tell students to use one portal for all research. We generally counsel students to check multiple sources–and getting students used to searching one place that happens to be appropriate for searching one topic may not work if the DPLA has nothing available on say, the latest computer technology.

Digital content and the DPLA

What content the DPLA will provide will surely become more clear over the following months. They have appointed Emily Gore as Director of Content, and continue to hold further working groups on content and audience. The DPLA website promises a remarkable vision for content:

The DPLA will incorporate all media types and formats including the written record—books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts, and digital texts—and expanding into visual and audiovisual materials in concert with existing repositories. In order to lay a solid foundation for its collections, the DPLA will begin with works in the public domain that have already been digitized and are accessible through other initiatives. Further material will be added incrementally to this basic foundation, starting with orphan works and materials that are in copyright but out-of-print. The DPLA will also explore models for digital lending of in-copyright materials. The content that is contributed to or funded by the DPLA will be made available, including through bulk download, with no new restrictions, via a service available to libraries, museums, and archives in the United States, with use and reuse governed only by public law. ⁶

All of these models exist in one way or another already, however, so how is this something new?

The major purveyors of out of copyright digital book content are Google Books and HathiTrust. The potential problems with Google Books are obvious just in the name–Google is a publicly traded company with aspirations to be the hub of all world information. Privacy and availability, not to mention legality, are a few of the concerns. HathiTrust is a collective of research universities digitizing collections, many in concert with Google Books, but the full text of these books in a convenient format is generally only available to members of HathiTrust. HathiTrust faced a lawsuit from the Authors Guild about its digitization of orphan works, which is an issue the DPLA is also planning to address.

Other projects exist trying to make currently in copyright digital books more accessible, of which Unglue.it is probably best known. This requires a critical mass of people to actively work to pay to release a book into the public domain, and so may not serve the scholar with a unique research project. Some future plans for the DPLA include to obtain funds to pay authors for use–but this may or may not include releasing books into the public domain.

DPLA is not meant to include books alone. Planning so far suggests that books make a logical jumping off point. The “Concept Note” points out that “if it takes the sky as its limit, it will never get off the ground.” Despite this caution, ideally it would eventually be a portal to all types of materials already made available by cultural institutions, including datasets and government information.

Do we need another platform?

The first element of the DPLA is code–it will use open source technologies in developing a platform, and will release all code (and the tools and services this code builds) as open source software. The so-called “Beta Sprint” that took place last year invited people to “grapple, technically and creatively, with what has already been accomplished and what still need to be developed…” ⁷. The winning “betas” deal largely with issues of interoperability and linked data. Certainly if a platform could be developed that solved these problems, this would be a huge boon to the library world.

Getting involved withe DPLA and looking to the future

While the governance structure is becoming more formal, there are plenty of opportunities to become involved with the DPLA. Six working groups (called workstreams) were formed to discuss content, audience, legal issues, business models, governance, and technical issues. Becoming involved with the DPLA is as easy as signing up for an account on the wiki and noting your name and comments on the working group page in which are interested. You can also sign up mailing lists to stay involved in the project. Like many such projects, the work is done by the people who show up and speak up. If you read this and have an opinion on the direction the DPLA should take, it is not difficult to make sure your opinion gets heard by the right people.

Like all writing about the DPLA since the planning began, turning to a thought experiment seems the next logical rhetorical step. Let’s say that the DPLA succeeds to the point where all public domain books in the United States are digitized and available in multiple formats to any person in the country, and a significant number of in copyright works are also available. What does this mean for libraries as a whole? Does it make public libraries research libraries? How does it change the nature of research libraries? And lastly, will all this information create a new desire for knowledge among the American people?

References

Darnton, Robert. “A Library Without Walls.” NYRblog, October 4, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/oct/04/library-without-walls/. ↩
McGowan, Ian. “National Libraries.” In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition, 3850–3863. ↩
“Frequently Asked Questions – About the Library (Library of Congress).” Text, n.d. http://www.loc.gov/about/faqs.html#every_book ↩
Dillon, Cy. “Planning the Digital Public Library of America.” College & Undergraduate Libraries 19, no. 1 (March 2012): 101–107. ↩
Rothman, David H. “It’s Time for a National Digital-Library System.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 24, 2011, sec. The Chronicle Review. http://chronicle.com/article/Its-Time-for-a-National/126489/. ↩
“Elements of the DPLA.” Digital Public Library of America, n.d. http://dp.la/about/elements-of-the-dpla/. ↩
“Digital Public Library of America Steering Committee Announces ‘Beta Sprint’ ”, May 20, 2011. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/newsroom/Digital_Public_Library_America_Beta_Sprint. ↩

Here’s the report on the discussion and experimentation session that my group had at Code4Lib Midwest about augmented reality applications. In my group were Erin Fisher and Kyle Felker of Grand Valley State University and Megan O’Neill of Albion College. We were interested in what augmented reality could do for marketing, public services, instruction, and other public areas of the library, and how it intersects with gamification.

We were not so interested in actually programming any augmented reality applications, but rather seeing what is available to the average consumer or library and whether it solves the problems inherent in QR codes. We defined these problems as follows: you have to know ahead of time what a QR code is to use it, you have to have the application to read it installed on your mobile device, and you have to have the ability to reach the internet with your device, which assumes cell coverage and/or wifi. For people who have all those in place, there are some additional problems of appropriate use.

We determined that for augmented reality to be truly useful to the average person, it should have the following features: it should provide an answer to a real need rather than simply trying to sell something, and should ideally answer that need right away rather than sending you to another website to find the answer. We also discussed the concept of a “subculture” aspect to these sorts of applications–for instance people sharing uncensored information about public locations or institutions that only the ones with access to the app have. But we struggled with what sort of information or services libraries have that fit into this mold. We do, after all, freely give away everything we have. What do we have that people really need and want? This ended up being a rather depressing line of conversation. One of the conclusions we drew that was less depressing was that not everything has to have an educational or information literacy increasing point. For instance, the fairy doors in Ann Arbor (can we talk about how wonderfully late 90s this site is?) include one at the Ann Arbor District library. This was a kind of goofy and whimsical thing that wasn’t explained in advance, but people started to catch on and wanted to find all the fairy doors in town. It gets people into locations they might not have visited otherwise, but doesn’t feel like it has an ulterior motive.

In libraries, we felt that there were a few obvious useful applications for augmented reality. First, wayfinding through large buildings is always helpful, though none of us work in buildings so large that this seemed useful. But we recalled our days in library school, where after two years working in the University of Illinois Main Library there were still plenty of unknown and unfindable corners. Certainly some quiet and creepy corners of the Main Stacks had a subculture aspect to them. How to do this is another matter entirely. GPS doesn’t necessarily work down to the foot like might happen with finding a book. Once upon a time you could use wireless access points to triangulate someone’s position. But according to some people I talked to there, this really doesn’t work anymore because wireless networks saturate areas so heavily you couldn’t pinpoint where someone was.

We also talked extensively about the concept of bridging the physical with the digital. While it may seem counter-intuitive, we could all offer examples of students finding their way to a physical space within the library without having any concept that they had access to many more digital resources. Finding a book on the shelf had an easy to imagine trajectory that wasn’t overwhelming–if augmented reality could offer a similar experience it could make the research experience more palatable. And of course, if it’s fun in itself, that’s even better. The University of Rochester’s Just Press Play is an example of something that does this very well. Another example was the fairly recent promotion of Jay-Z’s book using Bing, where people could “visit” the physical world virtually through Bing maps, and also use a mobile device to actually visit the places and see the digital content. This was a really well done and smart promotion that was very popular. But it was also wildly expensive, so while it might provide some inspiration, we can’t do it in libraries.

One of the promises of QR codes (and if you remember the CueCat you know this is going back awhile) is making print interactive. We discussed the Wonderbook, which is an odd hybrid between augmented reality toy, video game, and book. Personally if I played video games I could see something like that being attractive to me, but not something I would use otherwise. We discussed (and played around with) a lot of tools which make print or other physical objects do something interesting when you take a picture of them. But these have all the same problems that QR codes have: you have to have the right app, you have to know where to look, and you have to care enough to try to look. One of the ones we looked at could make a topless lady appear–sure, that might make you want to look, but perhaps less than appropriate for library wayfinding.

The main tools we played around with or researched include:

Layar (propietary; iOS and Android)
Aurasma (proprietary; iOS and Android)
mixAIRE (open source; iOS and Android)
ARIS (open source; iOS)
Argon (open source; iOS)

These didn’t always work perfectly on all our devices (we all had iOS devices but of varying ages and capabilities)–in particular the open source seemed to require many dependencies and not be as immediately useful. And basically all we ended up with were the ability to embed URLs or videos on magazines or other physical objects. It was fun, but ultimately didn’t seem to solve any of the problems we hoped that it would. Still, something learned.

Last but certainly not least, we would like to introduce you to the extremely important concepts of boozy popsicles and putting fruit such as blueberries and pineapple in lemon-lime pop (Diet 7-Up or Sprite, for instance). Once you have these things, the larger problems of the world tend to recede.

Additional reading: