Progress towardsthe Digital Future

Dr. Gloriana St. ClairDean of University Libraries

Digital Libraries ColloquiumFebruary 22, 2006

Purpose Introduce the NIH Public Access Policy as

a major first step toward solving dysfunction in scholarly communications

Compare the NSF-funded Million Book Project with Google Print and the Open Content Alliance

Foster an interchange about these developments relevant to education in Qatar

Scholarly Communications and NIH Essence of the problem Promise of open access NIH Public Access Policy proposal Current situation

Essence of the Problem

Provost Mark Kamlet at Carnegie Mellon’s Open Access Forum (2004)

Essence of the Problem

Serial & Monograph Costs, 1986-2003*

North American research libraries

*Source: www.arl.org/stats/

Essence of the Problem

Author Publisher

Goal Wide distribution

of work

Increase

revenue

Reward Reputation, P&T, grants

Maximized

profit

Strategy Publish Control

access & price

Mismatched Motives

What is “Open Access”? Immediate free availability on the public Internet Research literature that scholars produce without

expectation of payment (e.g., journal articles) Recognizes that the value of research increases

with use Exploits economics of Internet An access model, not a business model

What Open Access Can Achieve Expand information usage and application. Remove barriers that make content scarce. Weaken the position of publishers that use their

monopoly position to support excessively high prices.

Focus economic return on value addition (rather than content control).

Eliminate systemic inefficiencies by unbundling functions.

Introduce price competition. Benefits outweigh dislocations.

NIH Public Access Policy Proposal

Elias Zerhouni’s memo urging authors of NIH-funded research to submit final manuscripts to PubMed Central

Why Pennsylvania Mattered NIH Public Access Proposal began as a rider to NIH

appropriations bill (ATA) Arlen Specter is the chair of the Appropriations

Committee Rick Johnson called me because I have a certain

reputation, having left Journal of Academic Librarianship when Elsevier purchased it

Carnegie Mellon provost Mark Kamlet is a medical economist who understands the dysfunction and favors change

Why Pennsylvania Mattered Carnegie Mellon lobbyist, Maureen McFalls, has a

daughter in library school and was a great advocate Carnegie Mellon Libraries asked for letters from

PALCI, PALINET, Pennsylvania Library Association, etc.

ATA and SPARC arranged for Carnegie Mellon, Pitt, Penn, and Penn State provosts to send a joint letter

Provost Kamlet made telephone calls and visits on short notice

Why Pennsylvania Mattered

Provosts’ joint letter supporting expanded access to NIH-funded research

ATA

NIH Policy Fulfills its Promise Accessible electronic information is more

desirable than print Author goals of wide distribution and

reputation are met Publishers are not put out of business but the

public is better served Health domain has huge popular interest

NIH Policy Problem Slow uptake

Nature, New England Journal of Medicine

in the News, January 2006

Founder Sergey Brin said he believed Google is "doing the right thing" with their work in China:

"We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it.“1

“This is the day the world changes.”

John Wilkin, University of Michigan3

“… commercialize the great research libraries with a handshake, suddenly and epochally.”

Rory Litwin, in Library Juice2

Advent of Google Print (late 2004)

A Closer Look at the Players … Compare the NSF-funded Million Book

Project with Google Print and the Open Content Alliance (OCA)

Project the impact of partnership: Million Book Project and OCA

Digital v. Paper

Rory Litwin, “On Google’s Monetization of Libraries”4

1. Privacy [cookies]2. Introduction of commercial bias3. Questions about democratization

and equity of access4. Disintermediation issues5. Decontextualization of knowledge6. Closing of the information commons

In our rapidly changing world, lifelong learning and access to books have become essential to employment, health, peace, and prosperity. Greater public access to information is consistent with the goals of education and democracy.

Million Book Project

Dr. Raj Reddy

MBP Vision

To create online access to all published works …

Searchable, browsable and navigable by humans and machines …

Free-to-read Instantly available In any language At any literacy level Anywhere in the world

Google Print Vision

To organize the world’s information and make it useful and web-accessible.

“How many users will find, and then buy, books they never could have discovered any other way? How many out-of-print and backlist titles will find new and renewed sales life? How many future authors will make a living through their words solely because the Internet has made it so much easier for a scattered audience to find them?”5

OCA Vision6

To collect all published information , and make it accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world

Access to information is a key ingredient to education and an open society

We have the necessary technologies, and the will for an open society … Will we make it happen?

MBP Partners The National Science Foundation has awarded the

Million Book Project four grants for equipment and planning

Partners include government and academic institutions in India, China, and Egypt; academic libraries in the U.S.; OCLC; and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization

Newest partner is the Open Content Alliance

Google Print Leader & Partners Google, Inc. U. Michigan Stanford University Harvard University U. Oxford New York Public Library

Brewster Kahle, director and co-founder of the Internet Archive

I can do this

OCA Leaders

OCA Partners Adobe Systems Incorporated Biodiversity Heritage Library,

a cooperative project of: American Museum of Natural

History Harvard U. Botany Libraries Harvard U. Library of the

Museum of Comparative Zoology

Missouri Botanical Garden Natural History Museum,

London The New York Botanical

Garden Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Smithsonian Institution

Libraries

Columbia University Emory University European Archive HP Labs Johns Hopkins

University Libraries McMaster University Memorial University

of Newfoundland Million Book Project Missouri Botanical

Garden MSN National Archives

(United Kingdom) O'Reilly Media

Prelinger Archives Research Libraries

Group (RLG) Rice University Smithsonian

Institution Libraries University of British

Columbia University of

California University of Ottawa University of

Pittsburgh University of Toronto University of Virginia York University

MBP Collections Books for College Libraries (best books) University presses and scholarly societies

(with copyright permission) U.N.’s Food and Agriculture

Organization content National Agriculture Library Academic libraries with

agriculture collections

Janet McCue, Cornell University

will coordinate the agriculture collections

Google Print Collections Stanford – 40,000-volume pilot

Harvard – 40,000-volume pilot from a 15-million volume collection

U. Michigan – virtually the entire collection; add seven million to search engine; Michigan to “receive and own a high quality digital copy” and to provide access7

New York Public Library – a subset of a 20-million volume collection. Selection criteria = in public domain (1923), interesting, not too fragile

OCA CollectionsWill seed the archive with partners’ collections (below). Will scan U.S. collections in situ at 10¢ per page.

European Archive Internet Archive National Archives (UK) O'Reilly Media Prelinger Archives University of California University of Toronto

MBP Research Initiatives

Machine translation Massive distributed

database Storage formats Use of digital libraries Distribution and

sustainability

Security Search engines Image processing Optical Character

Recognition (OCR) Language processing Copyright laws

Research: Arabic OCR

R&D in Arabic OCR “Million Book Project at Bibliotheca Alexandrina,” by Youssef Eldakar et al.

Journal of the Zhejiang University SCIENCE: Special Proceedings Issue of the1st Int’l Conference on Universal Digital Library (ICUDL November 2005): p. 1331.

Research: Indian and Chinese OCR and Language Translation

OCA Research Initiatives

… In discussions with major publishers and the organizations that represent them in order to explore legal, sustainable business models through which more copyrighted content can be made widely available. … OCA looks forward to continued dialogue with publishers in order to explore and build solutions that benefit the entire community of Internet users.8

Exploring and/or creating inexpensive digitization techniques 9

Worries

Copyright, Copyright, Copyright Printing [Good News] Working with Publishers

Copyright, Copyright, Copyright …

Copyright is the biggest reality that we all face.

MBP Copyright Strategy

Focusing on available out-of-copyright materials (government documents, pre-1923 collections, etc., as well as indigenous cultural treasures …)

Incised palm leaves to be digitizedSaraswathi Mahal Library, India

Google Print Copyright Strategy10

For books in copyright, a Google Print search displays “snippet[s] of text”

A ‘snippet’ is defined as three lines Search returns three snippets per book and indicates

how many times search terms appear Search also returns bibliographic data about the book,

and information on where to buy the book or find it at a local library

Google Print Strategy Adjustments

“Google said yesterday that it would temporarily halt its program to make searchable, digital copies of the vast contents of three university libraries to give publishers and other copyright holders the chance to opt out of having their protected works copied.”11

OCA Copyright Strategy

The OCA is committed to respecting the copyrights of content owners. … OCA contributors must secure the permission of all concerned copyright holders prior to submitting materials to the OCA for digitization or inclusion in the archive.12

MBP Working with Publishers Focusing with increasing success on gaining

permission from university presses and scholarly societies to digitize books and provide access to searchable full-text.

The MBP approach is to request permission for a range of years, for example, everything published prior to 1990. A publisher can specify the cut-off year or, alternatively, specify the list of titles for which they grant non-exclusive permission to digitize in the MBP.

Google Print Working with Publishers

“We’ve already had great success working with publishers directly to add their works to our index through our Publisher Program, and when we add books with publisher permission, we can offer more information and a much richer user experience.”13

OCA Working with Publishers14

OCA has been in discussions with major publishers and the organizations that represent them in order to explore legal, sustainable business models through which more copyrighted content can be made widely available. O'Reilly Media is one commercial publisher that has already agreed to make certain content available to the OCA.

OCA looks forward to continued dialogue with publishers in order to explore and build solutions that benefit the entire community of Internet users.

2005 MBP Partners’ Meeting

Partners met in Hangzhou, China

India 200,000 volumes China 400,000 volumes Egypt 20,000 volumes

620,000 volumes

Status of Collection Digitization

Big New Ideas: Reading Online

“Will people read on screens in the future?”15

People often print long online documents (i.e., users still find hard copy easier to use)

Hardware improvement? Navigation improvement? Building on previous user behavior to help guide new users

from page to page online?

Big New Ideas: Synthetic Documents

Bypass current copyright restrictions with machine-made synthetic documents that transmit intellectual content.16

Big New Ideas: Big Finish17

Finish the Million Book Project by the next Partners Meeting (fall 2006)

Congregate all the metadata in one place

Conclusions Future of libraries is digital Technical progress is substantial Intellectual property laws continue to be a

major barrier Social reactions deserve more research by

librarians

Q & A

Digital future and education in Qatar … What lies ahead?

Thank You

Gloriana St. Clair

gstclair@andrew.cmu.edu

And thanks to my generous collaborators: Mark Kamlet, Provost, Carnegie Mellon Rick Johnson, Executive Director, SPARC

If you would like an electronic copy of this talk, contact Cindy Carroll, stell@cmu.edu

Endnotes

1. Brin, Sergey. Quoted by David Kirkpatrick, “Google Founder Defends China Portal.” Fortune (January 25, 2006). Available: http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/25/news/international/davos_fortune/.

2. Litwin, Rory. “On Google’s Monetization of Libraries.” Library Juice 7, 26 (December 17, 2004). Available: http://www.libr.org/Juice/issues/vol7/LJ_7.26.html#3.

3. Wilkin, John. Quoted in “Google to Scan Books from Major Libraries.” MSNBC Tech News & Reviews (December 14, 2004). Available: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6709342.

4. Litwin.

Endnotes

5. Schmidt, Eric. “Books of Revelation.” The Wall Street Journal(October 18, 2005). Available: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/point-of-google-print.html. Mr. Schmidt is Google CEO.

6. Kahle, Brewster. “Towards Universal Access to all Knowledge: Internet Archive.” Journal of the Zhejiang University SCIENCE: Special Proceedings Issue of the 1st International Conference on Universal Digital Library (ICUDL November 2005).

7. University of Michigan (Nancy Connell). “Google/U-M Project Opens the Way to Universal Access to Information.“ University of Michigan News Service (December 14, 2004). Available: http://www.umich.edu/news/?Releases/2004/Dec04/library/index.

Endnotes

8. Open Content Alliance. “Open Content Alliance FAQ.” Available: http://www.opencontentalliance.org/faq.html.

9. Kahle.

10. University of Michigan. “Google/U-M Project Questions and Answers.” The University Record Online (January 7, 2005). Available: http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/0405/Dec13_04/lib_qa.shtml.

11. Wyatt, Edward. “Google Library Database is Delayed.” New York Times (August 13, 2005). Available: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50614FD3E5A0C708DDDA10894DD404482.

Endnotes

12. “Open Content Alliance FAQ.”

13. Smith, Adam. “Discovering Hard-to-find Books.” Available: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/discovering-hard-to-find-books.html. Mr. Smith is Senior Business Product Manager for Google Print.

14. “Open Content Alliance FAQ.”

15. Lesk, Michael. “The Qualitative Advantages of Information: Bigger is Better.” Journal of the Zhejiang University SCIENCE: Special Proceedings Issue of the 1st International Conference on Universal Digital Library (ICUDL November 2005): p. 1176.

Endnotes

16. Shamos, Michael I. “Machines as Readers: A Solution to the Copyright Problem,” Journal of the Zhejiang University SCIENCE: Special Proceedings Issue of the 1st International Conference on Universal Digital Library (ICUDL November 2005): p. 1179-1187.

17. Proposed by N. Balakrishnan, Supercomputer Education & Research Center, Indian Institute of Science (ICUDL, November 2005).