As the original pioneer of open source knowledge, the library gets credit for a pretty remarkable idea: knowledge is for everybody. But more than that, making knowledge freely available benefits everybody. Taking that theme and applying it to the digital world, Global Voices founder Ethan Zuckerman writes about Maura Marx and the Open Knowledge Commons, a new project funded by the Alfred Sloan Foundation to coordinate the efforts to build an Alexandrian library for the digital age. At issue:
Formerly with the Boston Public Library’s digitization project, Marx sees the project of a universal digital library as an extention of the work Josiah Quincy Jr. and others took up when they formed the American public library movement - the availability of knowledge that would be 'free to all'. In a digital age, Marx argues that an open knowledge commons needs to be without enclosure, encompassing both all recorded media and the 'cognitive processes applied to it' - the uses of that media - and maintained in the public sphere for the use and benefit of everyone. Her vision is broader than just having access to all texts digitally, but being able to do complex, cross-text work like named entity analysis and text extraction on a huge corpus.
Of course, it’s not as simple as putting all the world’s books in a pile and scanning them one at a time. There’s a great deal of complex legal uncertainty around what libraries can and cannot do with scanned books. Public libraries are possible - in intellectual property terms in the US - through the doctrine of “first sale”: if you’ve bought a book, you can lend it to others, if you’d like, rather than forcing them to buy their own copy. It’s not so clear how this applies in a digital age, and there are open questions about copyright, licensing and fair use in a digital age.
As a result, most of the projects working on a digital library are starting with content that’s out of copyright.
Check out Ethan's post if you get the chance.
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