Many books can be found online these days, documents ranging from the entire works of Shakespeare to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are available for our reading pleasure. In 2002, Google continued its efforts to make the world’s information ‘universally accessible and useful’ by striving to scan all the books in the world into a database, making a library of unimaginable size accessible from around the world, “the library of utopia.” In a matter of months a team of engineers and programmers invented a scanning device that used a stereoscopic infrared camera to digitize books rapidly without damaging them. Not only would the scanner correct for the bowing of an open book but could decipher unusual fonts and up to 400 languages. After bringing the project public in 2004 and partnering with five of the world’s largest libraries, Google started to make digital copies of books in the public domain. Problems arose when Google started to scan books still under copyright. After a large legal bout with the Authors Guild and the Associate of American Publishers along with the rise of Facebook and other social networks, Google stalled its page scanning project to focus on other aspects of business.
With Google’s dreams on hold, another man took the reins. Robert Darnton, a 72-year-old distinguished historian and prize winning author, was recruited in 2007 to Harvard where he was named the director of its library system. Upon this new position, Darnton was able to pursue the dream that Google started, to establish a universal library online and “make all knowledge available to all citizens.” Darnton, however, was worried about the privatized ventures of Google. While the executives at Google seemed to be filled with idealism and magnanimity, Darnton was worried that the future could grow into “a hegemonic, financially unbeatable, technologically unassailable, and legally invulnerable enterprise that can crush all competition,” one that would “[commercialize] the content of our libraries” and “would turn the Internet into an instrument for privatizing knowledge that belongs in the public sphere.”
Wishing to create a truly free and open digital library, Darnton is bringing together libraries and universities, and along with funding from charitable foundations, is starting to build the ‘Digital Public Library of America’ (DPLA). With the help of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and seed money from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Darnton along with the rest of the steering committee set an ambitious goal of having the library in operation by April 2013.
There are many unanswered questions about how the DPLA will operate and what material it will host, but one question promises to be the DPLA’s biggest hurdle: how to navigate the country’s copyright restrictions? Changes in copyright law in the last half-century have complicated the issue even further and it is something the DPLA will continue to struggle with. While some of these restriction may be able to be resolved through agreements with publishers and authors, its hard to see exactly what will come of the idea of “the library of Utopia”. With public domain books already available across the internet through services like Google and HathiTrust it’s hard to see how the DPLA will distinguish itself.
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