Digital library

“ The promise of the digital library is the promise of great cost reductions while providing great increases in archive availability and accessibility. (...) There are literally thousands of digital library initiatives of a great many varieties going on in the world today. Digital libraries are being formed of scholarly works, archives of historical figures and events, corporate and governmental records, museum collections and religious collections. Some take the form of scanning and putting documents to the World Wide Web. ”

“ In the
long term, a digital library will only be one element of the whole library".
Digital libraries give instant access to many works in the public domain. They also give instant access to old and rare texts and images. The full-screen images are still quite long to download, so many sites were backed up to present small images, so as not to ask too much from the cybernaut's patience. Most of the time a bigger format can be requested by clicking on the selected image. This problem should be solved in the future with improvements in data transmission. ”

“ Libraries may also limit who they will lend digital copies to as an additional way to limit the overall reach of the copy and therefore the potential market effect. Libraries serve particular communities of users—an academic library primarily serves its students and faculty, a public library serves its local residents—and so the rationale would be that digital lending should be made equivalent to the same group of users who would have access to the physical materials. ”

“ Since the mid-1990s, libraries were studying how to store an enormous amount of data, and make it available on the internet through a reliable search engine. Library 2000 was a project run between 1995 and 1998 by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to explore the implications of large scale online storage, using the digital library of the future as an example. It developed a prototype using the technology and system configurations expected to be economically feasible in 2000. ”

“ Online publishing systems, such as Open Journal Systems and Digital Commons, enable libraries to publish digital journals and post copies of faculty scholarship. HathiTrust Digital Library, a collaboration of academic libraries, produces collections of digitized books from library collections and is working to establish a division for publishing original works. ”

“ The system we propose maintains the market balance long-recognized by the courts and Congress as between rightsholders and libraries, [10] and makes it possible for libraries to fulfill their “vital function in society” [11] by enabling the lending of books to benefit the general learning, research, and intellectual enrichment of readers by allowing them limited and controlled digital access to materials online. ”

“ Through the HDL, a print-disabled user can obtain access to the contents of works in the digital library using adaptive technologies such as software that converts the text into spoken words, or that magnifies the text. Currently, the University of Michigan’s library is the only HDL member that permits such access, although other member libraries intend to provide it in the future. ”

“ One project objective is to provide users of the Cornell library and the library staff with the ability to request facsimiles of digitized images or to retrieve the actual electronic image for browsing. A prototype viewing workstation has been created by Xerox, with input into the design by a committee of Cornell librarians and computer professionals. This will allow us to experiment with patron access to the images that make up the digital library. ”

“ A national digital library, not just a digital store leading to commercial collections, was just as essential as better hardware. Today a college student researching the effect of Shakespeare on popular culture is able to find the Bard’s work at the school library. ”

“ As new generations of information consumers expect immediate digital access to collections—along with those who have always needed but not been given digital access—libraries that fail to make their substantial collections available face anew the risk of becoming irrelevant or at least minimally effective in users’ eyes. ”

“ Any writer can create a website, and any website can already create a digital library. More and more libraries, bookstores and publishing houses have no walls, no windows and no shelves. Their premises are their websites, and all the transactions are made on the Web. As for distribution, it is still possible to buy newspapers and magazines at the newsstand or to receive them in the letterbox, but more and more people read them on the Web, and more and more periodicals are "only" electronic. ”

“ The morass of rights management, combined with the orphan works problem and the ever-increasing copyright length, has made it complicated to see a path forward to broad digital access.
For modern libraries with users whose research and information use patterns mean they look to digital access first, [17] this means that a whole world of research is effectively invisible to a variety of types of users. For some, the inability to physically travel to a library because of their remote physical location, economic wherewithal, or homebound limitations means that physical lending is not practical. ”

“ The Xerox software is MS DOS based and utilizes off-the shelf programs such as Microsoft Windows and Wang Image Wizard. The digital library is designed to be hardware-independent and to provide interchangeability with other institutions through network connections. Access to the digital files themselves is two-tiered: Bibliographic records for the computer files are created in RLIN and Cornell's local system and access into the actual digital images comprising a book is provided through a document control structure and a networked image file-server, both of which will be described. ”

“ Our principal legal argument for controlled digital lending is that fair use—an “equitable rule of reason” [8] —permits libraries to do online what they have always done with physical collections under the first sale doctrine: lend books. The first sale doctrine, codified in Section 109 of the Copyright Act, provides that anyone who legally acquires a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display, or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. This is how libraries loan books. ”

“ For example, a library might introduce lending limits based on library experience with physical lending. If a physical book could be expected to circulate 2,000 times before it degrades, the library could place the same limit on circulation of the digital copy. For many books, this could pose little practical challenge. Large research libraries hold many books that have circulated very seldom in print, [151] and so for many obscure materials ever hitting a maximum loan threshold may be unlikely (though we recognize, digital availability may itself drive lending) . ”

“ Attempting to clearly answer those questions on a title-by-title basis has proven costly, [14] making full digital access for large numbers of works based on rightsholder permission difficult. Particularly for books and other published materials for which there was once an active market, libraries have not yet been able to provide broad full-text access online. ”

“ After digitizing 750,000 books and indexing 80 million journal articles, Microsoft ended the Live Search Books program in May 2008, to focus on other activities, and closed the website. These books are available in the OCA collections of the Internet Archive.
A main issue for digital libraries is the lack of proofreading of digitized books, that ensures a better accuracy of the text without any loss from the print version. The only digital library proofreading its books has been Project Gutenberg, with 28,000 high-quality ebooks available in January 2009. ”

“ Others may have identifiable owners, but are in practice neglected, unavailable in the digital marketplace and with no plan for revitalization in modern formats. For all, it means that they are not fully meeting the basic goals of copyright to promote “the Progress of Science and the useful Arts.” [21] Their unavailability online benefits neither creators nor the reading public.
So, how can libraries provide access? First, we start with a detailed look at the two fundamental copyright law doctrines that already empower libraries to fulfill their missions: first sale and fair use. ”

“ In October 2004, Google launched the first part of Google Print as a project aimed at publishers, for internet users to be able to see excerpts of books and order them online. In December 2004, Google launched the second part of Google Print as a project intended for libraries, to build up a digital library of 15 million books by digitizing the collections of major partner libraries, beginning with the libraries of the Universities of Michigan (7 million books) , Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, and the New York Public Library. ”

“ In the future, researchers working from their own workstations in their offices, or their networks, will have access—wherever they might be—through a request server being built into the new digital library. A second assumption is that the preferred means of finding the material will be by looking through a catalogue. PERSONIUS described the scanning process, which uses a prototype scanner being developed by Xerox and which scans a very high resolution image at great speed. ”

“ Cornell currently is working to extend access to the digital library to readers using workstations from their offices. This year is devoted to the development of a network resident image conversion and delivery server, and client software that will support readers who use Apple Macintosh computers, IBM windows platforms, and Sun workstations. Equipment for this development was provided by Sun Microsystems with support from the Commission on Preservation and Access. ”

“ Or Manybooks.net, which converts Project Gutenberg's eBooks into formats readable on PDAs. Or Bookshare.org, the main digital library for the visual impaired community in the US, which converts books from Project Gutenberg into Braille format and DAISY (Digital Audio Information System) format.
What is entailed exactly, once copyright clearance is received? Digitization is done by scanning the book page after page to get "image" files. Then volunteers run an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to convert "image" files into text files. ”

“ The third and fourth CDL controls are that libraries should (3) “limit the total number of copies in any format in circulation at any time to the number of physical copies the library lawfully owns (maintain an “owned to loaned” ratio) ,” and (4) “lend each digital version only to a single user at a time just as a physical copy would be loaned.” These controls ensure that libraries lending digital copies don’t get more than what they bargained for. A library that owns a single copy of a book could only lend a single copy out at a time. ”

“ Our focus is on these narrow and specialized use by libraries. Again, we limit our analysis to non-commercial, controlled, digital lending by U.S. libraries of digitized copies of print books held in their collections. [46]
In applying fair use, not every factor in the analysis will be highly relevant in every situation. [47] As we will show, for CDL, the first factor, “purpose and character of the use,” and the fourth factor “effect on the potential market” are the most significant. ”

“ Libraries do not always need to acquire public performance licenses when they purchase a film for their collections. If the New York Public Library lends Woody Allen a DVD of the 1940 Marx Brothers’ film Go West so he can watch it at home while eating take-out Chinese food, why can’t he watch it in the library’s viewing room? Indeed, watching a library-owned DVD in a small viewing room seems little different from using a library’s microform reader to read microfiche, or a library computer to access digital information ”

“ Libraries thinking about CDL will encounter risk, both positive and negative. On the positive side, we believe there is a significant upside: CDL helps libraries fulfill their missions in the broadest sense, using technology to increase effective, non-discriminatory access to collections for our users, and the world. Libraries have faced existential challenges for decades—“Is the library dead?”—but have survived in part because of their responsiveness to new technology. ”

“ CDL contributes substantial broad benefits to public knowledge by allowing the public, for the first time, to access particular materials digitally. For public libraries, especially when these collections have been purchased by tax dollars, it is in the public’s best interest to have modern access to these works, which were purchased for their benefit. ”

“ To justify the effort and expense of digital preservation, the works preserved will typically be unique, rare, or, in any event, out-of-commerce, and the library’s activities therefore will not be mere substitutes for acquisition of a new digital copy of the work. Works in obscure, near-obsolete formats present access challenges as well as preservation ones, but the same fair use rationales will apply. Works trapped in decaying and increasingly obscure formats will disappear completely without diligent work from librarians to migrate them to usable formats. ”