Knowledge for Sale

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Last December, Google announced a plan with five major libraries to scan their holdings page by page. As noted by Wade Roush in Technology Review (May 2005), the project could have unforeseen consequences. "Considering the limited life span of each new data format or electronic storage medium (have you used a floppy disk lately?), keeping digital materials alive for future generations will, ironically, be much more costly and complicated than simply leaving a paper book on a library shelf," he writes. Another concern is that Google will eventually charge access fees or couple the works with ads. Digital storage could make rare texts more widely available, but they're also more easily privatized and put up for sale.

Siva Vaidhyanathan writes that libraries are under pressure to conform to "pay-per-view" models. "Imagine this," he says: "An electronic journal is streamed into a library. A library never has it on its shelf, never owns a paper copy, can't archive it for posterity. Its patrons can access the material, and maybe print it, maybe not." And the purchased material could be lost if the subscription expires or the provider goes out of business. That's not a good model for a library, he asserts. "You might as well be sitting at a computer terminal in a copy shop."

As Nicholson Baker explains in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House, 2001), some libraries have begun tossing old books and newspapers (or selling them to collectors). Others are trying, vainly, to bring order to Internet use, devoting more and more time to cataloging and "selecting" Web sites. Many librarians are now in effect e-librarians, providing reference service via e-mail, aiding computer users, and tapping into subscription databases for everything from digitized classical music to maps.

As libraries go digital, reduce hours, and lay off staff, their relationship with patrons will have to change. In theory at least, the USA Patriot Act, which opened up library records to government scrutiny after 9/11, will bring its own chill, turning library workers into surrogate federal agents. Dissident librarians are said to have shredded files, deleted computer logs, and searched for ways around the law's provision that forbids explicitly telling "persons of interest" that investigators have paid a call. But grudgingly or otherwise, most of their peers have adapted to the new climate. What's more, some critics warn that library schools are producing new librarians with no cultural memory, technically savvy but oriented more toward commerce than to the library's historic role.

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