Yes, let's get our libraries online.

TECHNOLOGICALLY, WE ARE APPROACHING THE POINT AT WHICH it will be possible to move academic libraries out of their buildings and into the computers of scholars, teachers, and students everywhere. Not just the card catalogs, not just some digitized collections, not just leased e-journals, but massive quantities of books, manuscripts, and audiovisual resources that our libraries have painstakingly accumulated over decades, and even centuries, in support of scholarly research and liberal education. Massive digitization for widespread online access can be achieved. Why not do it?

Advantages

Think what massive digitization could mean. Resources now available only within the walls of major research libraries could be universally accessible. Digital library resources could flow freely not only across institutions but across continents. The need for time-consuming, expensive trips for research to institutions outside a scholar's own could be substantially reduced. Resources available to teachers and students for course work of all kinds could be substantially increased. Concerns of libraries about where to store continuous influxes of publications could be alleviated. And materials now largely unused on library shelves could get new life. We already know that use of an obscure book, journal, or manuscript can increase dramatically after it is digitized.

The potential benefits do not stop there. The more material we digitize for online access, the more material we will have available for use in new ways. Already we have learned to build search capabilities into digital databases that far exceed what is feasible through manual searching. Digital technologies also enable us to create customized databases of texts and images as special course resources and research-project collections. Additionally, the technologies enable us to compare texts and images online, link them to related resources, recombine them for analysis, view them in multiple dimensions, and accelerate the creation of knowledge through Internet exchanges of pre-publication research results.

Moreover, some academic research libraries are helping scholars and their disciplinebased organizations publish electronically. Some libraries additionally are capturing "e-scholarship"--Web pages, databases, and course content created digitally by scholars and teachers--for widened accessibility, now and in the future, as part of digital libraries. Digital librarians are also experimenting with "portal services" that will draw on resources in libraries across the country--and even the world--not tapped by conventional, commercial search services. These portals will electronically locate materials of interest to scholars working on specialized research topics in particular disciplines. Overall, it appears technically feasible for libraries to metamorphose into information centers of more value for services they provide than for books they own.

Obstacles and overcoming them

What stands in the way of such boons to research and education? The major obstacles can be placed under three headings: money, copyright, and collaborative will.

Money is the most obvious concern. Already major libraries are spending a great deal on digital resources. According to statistics available from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), in 2000-2001 its members spent on electronic resources more than $132 million--16 percent of their library materials budgets, and since 1992-93, average expenditures for digital resources have increased from two to six times faster annually than average expenditures on library materials. But the growth in digital resource investment, much of which has gone into leasing electronic journals, still leaves our faculties and students with electronic access to only a fragment of traditional library holdings. Even though any one book needs to be digitized just once, academic libraries today are too financially stressed to take on massive digitization of their collections.

Realizing how great the benefits could be, however, a coalition of non-profit organizations and private foundations have created "The Digital Promise Project," which is asking Congress to finance educational uses of digital technologies with some $18 billion expected to come from government auctions of licenses to the electromagnetic spectrum. Digitization of library material is among the contemplated uses of that allocation.

Even if Congress does not comply, however, progress toward massive digitization could still come about if libraries made a concerted effort. Earlier, when libraries recognized the value of putting card catalogs online, they did it through long-range planning, securing strategic grants, and creating new services such as OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). Not every dollar required may be immediately available, but financial limits need not keep librarians and their universities from committing to digitizing as much, and as fast, as we can.

Copyright restrictions are the second major inhibitor of massive digitization. Much of the material that libraries have so far digitized for online access consists of publications not under copyright. In consequence, relatively few twentieth-century works are freely available online to teachers and students. Only institutions wealthy enough to lease copyrighted resources can have access to them, and then only for use by their own campus communities. The situation became more restricted when an act of Congress, recently upheld by the Supreme Court, extended to seventy years the time that copyrighted publications can be kept out of the public domain after the deaths of their authors.

Nonetheless, librarians and publishers are not behaving as unmitigated enemies. With support last year from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, several academic research libraries and commercial publishers began to explore terms for establishing archives of e-journals to assure their preservation for long-term access. And the Association of American Publishers joined with the Council on Library and Information Resources to form the Working Group of Librarians and Publishers to discuss mutual concerns and look for common ground. New relationships are needed. It may be possible, for example, for publishers to grant libraries permission to digitize copyrighted works in exchange for rights to market works through libraries. Agreements are far from assured, but we are not regarding current intellectual property obstacles as wholly insurmountable.

What, then, about the third major concern, which I called the will to collaborate? What that connotes is the need for libraries to collaborate with each other if we are to have massive digitization for universal access. Why is collaboration necessary?

There are many reasons. No one institution, not even the Library of Congress, can digitize everything for access by everybody. No one institution possesses everything of use in liberal learning. No one institution can capture for wide access all the e-scholarship being created by scholars individually and in networks that cross campus boundaries. No one institution can guarantee the perpetual preservation of every online scholarly resource, whether digitized or originally digital. No one institution can be expected to carry the entire financial burden for digitization, access, or preservation. And the library community as a whole cannot afford to waste resources on the redundancies that would result if every higher-education institution tried to build a digital library independently.

That logic is obvious but so are the obstacles. How would universities and colleges divide up responsibilities? Which would digitize what, expand access to what, preserve what, and how much? What might it cost an institution in status, prestige, and competitive edge to cease being the sole possessor of a library collection distinguished by size, rarity, or both? Can libraries change from viewing themselves as housed collections to becoming instead information organizers and guides, and compete, if they must, not in collections but in the information services they develop for their particular patrons?

Also, the property-rights and financial issues come back into play. Can a library legally surrender control over the use of digital material shared in widely accessible and freely re-combinable formats? And at a time when drops in income from tax revenues and endowment portfolios severely hurt higher education budgets, can campus libraries afford even collaborative responsibilities?

Beginnings

The fact is that collaborations have begun. Research libraries that have joined the Digital Library Federation (DLF), most of them at universities, have collaborated on experiments, shared results, and agreed on some "best practices" and standards, laying the technical groundwork for online libraries. Some are working on technologies for "interoperability" and have begun, in the Open Archives Initiative, to share information about their collections for access in specialized, cross-institutional portal services. And possibilities for "federating" the digital collections of DLF member institutions are receiving attention in their strategic planning sessions.

Many academic research libraries already provide computer-readable, if not re-combinable, collections that are accessible beyond their own campuses. Cornell and the University of Michigan collaborated to begin the extensive "Making of America" digital collection. Numerous universities have contributed to the "American Memory" collection available online from the Library of Congress, and to the National Science Digital Library sponsored by the National Science Foundation. MIT is federating its "D-Space" repository of e-scholarship being created digitally by faculty on its campus and others.

Can we build on such efforts to move our libraries massively into the computers of our faculties and students? Whatever the obstacles, we may actually have little choice. A recent national survey confirms that high proportions of students and faculty alike are now going to the open Internet and their campus libraries' Web sites for information they need. Their demand for Web-accessible resources will keep pushing us to increase digital resources.

Failing to do so massively, accessibly, and in formats that permit new, creative uses of educational resources will betray the new technologies' possibilities. When one has the technological ability to take students in any college on intellectual adventures along hyperlinked pathways through the world's texts, recordings, and images, we must do it. The obstacles can be overcome if we make a collaborative commitment to the development of these rich new resources for liberal education.

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PHOTO CREDITS

Cover: Chicago Historical Society/Chicago Daily News, Inc.

Page 9, 27: Butler University 

Page 12, 37: Fisk University 

Page 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 33, 62: Earlham College 

Page 21, 22-23, 29, 30, 31: Oberlin College 

Page 24, 25: Library of Congress/American Memory

Page 34, 63: Berea College 

Page 35: Brown University

Page 36: Hamline University

Page 39, 40: Southern Oregon University, photos by Paul Talley

Page 43, 44: University of Chicago

Page 49, 51: Skidmore College, photos by Mark McCarty

Page 53, 57, 58, 61: Birmingham-Southern College

Page 65: Bethany College

DEANNA B. MARCUM is associate librarian of Congress for library services.