Kyle Banerjee's Blog

When she suggests that she make a special trip to the store to pick up beer and onion rings while you take care of the dog.

That is all.

I’m not sure how this wasn’t on my radar, but today I learned about a pilot project where the Library of Congress is putting photos on Flickr. For those of you who aren’t librarians, this might not sound like a big deal — even kids mount lots of photos on Flickr and the combined size of the high profile collections LC has added is smaller than many peoples’ personal photo collections.

However, LC’s willingness to work on Flickr represents a quantum leap forward because a key player in the library world is realizing that the ticket to success is to use the Internet like everyone else. Historically, librarians have collected, organized, and physically protected information. While this is a great strategy for physical materials, it’s not good model for resources that require massive technical, staff, and financial resources that we don’t have.

Just as practically all decent sized libraries depend on vendors for collection development, acquisitions, cataloging, and processing when physical resources are concerned, there is nothing wrong with doing the same for electronic resources. Besides, processing photos with Flickr is a heck of a lot easier than it is with CONTENTdm. Oh yeah, you also don’t need to drop $50K to get started and keep paying many thousands each year in maintenance fees.

I have heard fears expressed that this amounts to a loss of control over the information. I think that quite the opposite is the case. So long the information can be extracted (Flickr has a pretty decent API), it could be even safer than we could make it.

Although, if some joker changes the password for the account and gets flattened by a bus, there could be some real headaches. But everyone knows that the best way to keep electronic information safe is to maintain more than one copy.

Recently, I learned that Google is expanding its digitization program to include newspapers. Apparently they’re contacting libraries and content providers to see what resources and partnership opportunities are available. You’d think this would be a good thing, but a colleague told me that it created a squawk where she works. Upon learning what Google was up to, a number of people at her library started discussing how to stop Google by throwing up intellectual property barriers and other means.

This reaction is sad but all too common in the library community. Although we talk a good game for open access, many libraries adopt a very different stance when it comes to giving away useful things that they create. The vast majority of catalog records are created at public expense, yet these are copyrighted and cannot be legally used without paying substantial fees. Critical library tools are designed by librarians who work at public expense, but then are copyrighted and sold by the American Library Association or OCLC (a cooperative of libraries). We tell everyone else to mount their content on open web servers, but very few of our publications are distributed this way. When we set up digital archives consisting of local resources, we often put in access restrictions, even for low grade materials like student papers.

The thing that’s particularly vexing about the Google example at hand is that practically every library project has the explicit goal of being included in Google, and that lots of money and endless meetings are dedicated to this objective. I suspect my colleague’s library fears that successful efforts by Google may cause the grant fed cash cows grazing on library digitization turf to wander off.

Just as it is bad for the sport when an athlete intentionally trips the opponent he is unable to beat in a fair race, undermining others is a disservice to our users and our profession. The fact of the matter is that Google will do a much better job of digitizing and providing access than any library can — we simply do not have the resources and expertise to compete at this level.

Besides, institutions with a lot more resources than us have been unable to stop Google. Google has been sued for their indexing, how they crawl, advertise, and digitize — the publishers weren’t too happy when they started Google Books. We need to come to terms with reality, and that is that Google will continue to digitize things. That is probably good for most people. We should welcome anything that improves things for users, even if it forces us to learn new things and take our services in new directions.