As the digitization of human culture accelerates, publishers and academics have had to begin addressing a basic question: Who will control knowledge in the future?
So far, the most likely answer to that question has been a private company: Google. Since 2004 Google Books has been scanning books and putting them online; the company says it has already scanned more than 15 million. Google estimates there are about 130 million books in the world, and by 2020, it plans to have scanned them all.
Now, however, a competitor may be emerging. Last year, Robert Darnton, a cultural historian and director of Harvard University’s library system, began to raise the prospect of creating a public digital library. This library would include the digitized collections of the country’s great research institutions, but it would also bring in other media - video, music, film - as well as the collection of Web pages maintained by the Internet Archive.
Like Google Books, it would have as its goal the eventual digitization of human culture, preserving the works of the world’s authors, scholars, artists, and entertainers and making them widely available. Unlike Google Books, however, this library would not be operated by a for-profit company. It would be accessible to any person, in any place, at any time, at no cost.
Since Darnton began discussing it last year, with a speech at a Harvard conference that was later published in The New York Review of Books, the idea has quickly evolved from a “what if” proposal to a project with its own momentum. Its steering committee includes representatives from the Library of Congress, Harvard, and other libraries and archives; the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored a meeting in Washington last month to work through some of the technical hurdles. It has a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Darnton says it is also attracting interest from other large philanthropies. He believes a prototype should be up and running within three years. “It’s not the utopian dream of some college professor,” he says. “This thing actually is feasible.”
Darnton, a scholar of the French Enlightenment as well as the history of the book, has directed Harvard’s libraries since 2007. With more than 16 million volumes, Harvard’s is the largest university library in the world, but this new project aims to be much bigger: If Darnton succeeds, the Digital Public Library of America will be largest library in human history. He spoke with Ideas on the phone from his office in Cambridge.
IDEAS: What was the impetus for starting this project?
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