Rare Book Monthly
Articles - January - 2005 Issue
All Books and All Knowledge: Coming Soon to <i>Your</i> Computer
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At the beginning we mentioned that the tide of information may be too great for the large companies to control. Google is clearly going to be a major force in this latest information revolution, and I cannot help but believe Microsoft will find a way to join in, but there are others. Project Gutenberg has been in the process of posting complete books on the internet for quite awhile now. If you have never checked them out, here's the link: http://promo.net/pg/. It went virtually unnoticed next to Google's announcement, but the Internet Archive also recently announced a digitization program. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization that provides, among other items, the "Wayback Machine," which allows you to look at websites the way they were at various times in the past. If you think that correcting egregious errors on your website will once and for all do away with the embarrassment, take a look at the "Wayback Machine" for a sobering dose of reality.
The Internet Archive will be hosting texts as part of a cooperative effort with ten libraries and organizations from five countries. They state that 27,000 volumes are currently available, 50,000 more will be posted in the first quarter of 2005, and they have commitments for one million books. Among the libraries and organizations taking part are Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S., the Library of Congress American Memory Project, the Universities of Toronto, Ottawa, and McMaster in Canada, plus organizations in Egypt, India, China, and the Netherlands. As with Google and Gutenberg, the texts are free to the public.
So where is all of this leading us? The answer is "somewhere." No one really knows what changes this will make to our institutions or in our lives. Who could have imagined the impact of the internet on our lives, our schools, our businesses, just a dozen years ago? Who would have imagined the impact television would have on our reading habits half a century ago, or the impact of radio a century ago? We do not yet know what the impact will be of this latest flood of information coming from millions of books, old and new, in the years ahead. All we can say is that the effect will be substantial.
What happens to libraries as more of the information hidden deep within their vaults becomes available to the public from the comfort of their homes? What will be the effect on those who sell old books when those books can be read from your home computer screen whenever you like for free? Obviously, these institutions and businesses will need to evolve to meet the needs of a changing reality. Some will thrive, despite the seemingly negative implications for printed material. The internet itself was filled with negative implications for those who deal in books, and yet out of it emerged Amazon.com and the cooperative bookselling sites. The world is again changing, and from the realms of booksellers, collectors, libraries and other institutions, there will be winners and losers. The winners will be those who watch the changes closely and find ways to better serve the public in the emerging new world.
