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Libraries and the Digital World

Introduction

This chapter addresses the parallel between the library as store of knowledge and today's Internet-connected network of shared resources. While the library, in its physical manifestation, was and is limited both in its content and in who is able to access that content, today's digital networks offer greater content and greater access. Even while Internet access is not universal or equitable, it is more so than any previous cultural repository. The principle of free access at the point of use - what makes a library different from, for instance, a bookshop - stands in stark opposition to a pay-per-use model of culture. While the 'best' libraries have often been closed to those who were not already privileged (free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who cannot), today's network library promises or threatens to extend the principle of free access to all cultures, to anyone who can log onto a computer. Given that this demographic maps directly onto that part of the human population that might otherwise have been able and willing to pay for access to cultural goods, the digital network library (the World Wide Web of shared human culture) poses a serious threat to 'business as usual' - or at least the possibility of extending a capitalist business model based on private ownership, scarcity and the price mechanism, from the realm of physical goods, to informational goods. However, if the digital library represents the possibility of an information society, it also disrupts the possibility of an information economy, at least in the way economics is currently understood.

This chapter begins by drawing out Alvin Gouldner's (1976) distinction between information as either culture or capital, and the significance of this distinction in contemporary disputes over power and freedom. The history of literacy, education and libraries is then touched upon in connection to what can be called the dual and contradictory revolutions associated with information in the digital age: one revolution in the direction of increased commodification of formerly free-to-access culture, and the second revolution freeing access. The works of Siva Vaidhyanathan and Claudy Op den Kamp are then used to highlight both the potential for, and the attempts to limit, free access to culture in the digital age. Vaidhyanathan explores the 'anarchic' potential for a free culture that arises in an age where the principle of libraries as a free resource expands radically. Contrariwise, Op den Kamp highlights the chilling impact of copyright extension in expanding the domain of 'orphan works', works that are not being made formally available by archives for fear of prosecution by unknown claimants upholding rights initially held by the long since dead. Of course, archives and libraries did and do play a role in maintaining private ownership, such as in the case of libraries of record and of patent libraries. However, the former are now largely redundant, and new archives are emerging to preserve and assert the common culture against patent appropriation. It is true too that patent libraries, while designed to protect private rights claims, are also the repository of the common culture once each particular patent claim expires. Furthermore, it is essential to note that libraries operate according to academic principles linked to the assertion of an author's moral rights, not simply their copyrights. While copyright law does apply to copying whole works, the content of libraries is there to be used freely, in exchange for appropriate referencing of the author's name (if that work is 'used' by its reader), not payment to the work's publisher. As such, attempts by copyright holders and IP protection lobbyists to equate copyright infringement with plagiarism should be resisted.

In conclusion, this chapter suggests that the global network society has witnessed the rise of a new form of digital archive of the world's culture, and that this should be celebrated and protected from those who would close down free-sharing to preserve scarcity and, hence, maintain the scope to profit from selling information. The question that arises, in a post-scarcity free culture of sharing, is not how to allocate scarce resources. It is, rather, how to locate and choose information in conditions of plenty. Scope exists in such conditions for manipulation and even exploitation; the struggle between a free culture and a fee culture is not simply abolished by the Internet. Nonetheless, the radical potential of sharing does here expand.

Information: Culture or Capital

For Alvin Gouldner (1976), knowledge and information are the foundations for practical action in the world and can be applied in various different ways. On the one hand, knowledge privatized - where information is packaged within the parameters of intellectual property rights - becomes a form of capital, an asset whose application can demand some form of rent, profit or private return. On the other hand, information and knowledge shared become the common culture, from which all can benefit and which all can use to whatever advantage they wish without the need to pay to access or use it. This distinction between private capital and shared culture, both drawing upon and disputing access to knowledge and information, is a thread running through this book. It is the same distinction - drawn initially by Castells but developed in this work - between today's dominant networks of power built upon and defending private property and new forms of counterpower based upon sharing.

This tension between culture and capital goes to the heart of today's global network society. For Gouldner, the axiom that all human economic and social activity has its roots in 'knowledge' (in as far as human 'action' can be distinguished from animal behaviour) goes back much further than simply the rise of today's knowledge economy, information society or so-called post-industrial society. The conflict between culture and capital recurs across all human history. Nonetheless, this dispute becomes particularly acute in today's global network society, as the distinction between physical capital and informational content (i.e., in terms of the kinds of products that are being produced) becomes less significant, as does the distinction between physical labour and informational content (i.e., in terms of the kinds of work that is being done). Nonetheless, orchards and tools needed tending, and even the most brute features of the industrial revolution never fully removed the need for brains beneath the workers' caps (Braverman 1974). The very notion that we have undergone a simple transition from agricultural to industrial, and then another from industrial to post-industrial societies (Bell 1976), is misleading. The most advanced science and technology are applied to farming, and it is the service sector that retains most of the old principles of craft and personal 'service' (Castells 1996). The abstracted knowledge, in the form of formal information/content, that governs farming, manufacture and service work is now largely stored and distributed digitally. What is interesting is not the distinction between agriculture, manufacturing and service work, but rather the globally distributed nature of such knowledge/information deployed in all these sectors, and the disputes over access to and application of such knowledge and information within a global network society.

In this regard, an interesting example of the disputed nature of knowledge and information in the global network society comes in the form of libraries. In recent years, digitization has allowed publishers to create academic journal articles first and foremost in a digital format. The creation of paper (physical) copies comes later (if at all). This has radically reduced costs of both production and, even more so, distribution. It is now common practice for academic libraries, at least in relatively affluent societies, to buy their journal subscriptions from publishers in 'electronic bundles'. Rather than subscribing to individual paper titles, a library or a consortium of libraries negotiates to receive a set of titles from a particular publisher. This may involve a base set of paper copies (for a limited number of titles) as well as a larger set of electronic titles made available 'on top'. Not only does such electronic access increase the number of titles that a particular library can make available to its readers, it also (most often) means that the particular library gains access to the (digitized) back catalogue of that journal, even if it had not previously subscribed to that title. This allows a significant 'catch up' for relatively new or relatively under-resourced libraries (David 1996, 1998), as they are now able to offer their users as great a back catalogue of content as older and better-resourced libraries (at least to the extent that older content has been digitized). This offers up an immense democratic potential, not only within developed countries, but also for less developed countries, especially where digital access means a far more fundamental 'catching up'. However, there is a (significant) catch. For those titles that are only accessed electronically, such access may be removed, unlike when a physical copy has been acquired. Having fewer, if any, hard copies distributed increases control, even as it also increases the risk of loss/corruption of...