Category Archives: DPLA

The Launch of the Digital Public Library of America

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My favorite tweet in a long time, courtesy of @electriclit:

It’s going to be a good day. The Digital Public Library of America opens at noon: j.mp/15hTf0w // @dpla

Today is launch day for the DPLA.  Hooray!  So many people have worked so very hard in the past two years to get the plan down, the services built, the data in, and the site up and running.  It’s just a start.  There’s vastly more to be done.  And it’s not the launch day we had in mind; the in-person celebration will have to wait until the fall.  But the team got to the launch date on time and on budget.  I’m so grateful to everyone who has put their shoulder to this wheel together, across institutions, time, and space.

The key message of the launch of the Digital Public Library of America today is that collaboration can work.  We can build together, using the design and the principles of the web itself, a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts.  The future of libraries is bright indeed if this same spirit that has gotten us to DPLA launch day can persist.  Under the leadership of the founding executive director Dan Cohen and the founding team of Emily Gore, Amy Rudersdorf, and Kenny Whitebloom, I am highly confident that it will.  Thanks to each of them for taking the leap of faith to work full-time on this start-up.  Because as of today, the DPLA is in their hands, spun-off, officially, from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University into a shiny, new, approved 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

The collaboration to get to this point has taken many forms.  The number of different types of institutions that had to come together to make this possible is itself remarkable.  For starters, a group of forward-looking funders had to agree to come together to pay for something that is going to be enormous, and very expensive.  Our founding support has come, in the form of millions of dollars, from the Sloan Foundation, the Arcadia Fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Knight Foundation (disclosure: I am on its Board of Trustees), and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.  The Open Society Institute also supported a key meeting, with our new partners at Europeana.  First among equals is Doron Weber, vice president of the Sloan Foundation, whose vision this project this is, as much as anyone’s.  Without all this financial support to date, and more still to come, there would be no DPLA.

There would also not be a DPLA without human involvement from librarians, archivists, museum staff, technologists, and people who care about these things from a vast array of public and private institutions.  The human interoperability — literally, thousands of people working together, virtually and in person — to build something on this scale, for the country and the world, is impressive.  The vast majority of people working on the DPLA are volunteers, coordinated by a tiny core staff who are devoting their full-time efforts to the cause.  It is how the web has been built, it is how free software is built, it is how social media is being built, it is how Wikipedia is being built.  This approach scales, it can thrive, and it can be sustainable.  It is working.  The launch of the DPLA is proof that it can work in the world of libraries in a digital-plus era.

The Obama Administration has promoted the creation of public-private partnerships to solve the country’s hardest problems and to create jobs.  I think the @dpla is a perfect example of how this strategy can work.  We are so grateful for the leadership of the National Archives and the Smithsonian, as content partners, and the NEH and the IMLS, as funders, for joining with those of us in the private sector to make this launch happen.  Those who don’t think government can work don’t know what leaders like David Ferriero, Susan Hildreth, Martin Kalfatovich, Eva Caldera, and Jim Leach do for us all as public servants.  They know how to collaborate with the private sector — like the growing number of content and service hubs across the country — in the broader public interest.  There are many others in Washington, DC, and in state government who could jump in to help.  We welcome you any time.  We are solving a hard problem for the country and we have created new jobs — four so far, and counting.  We can do so much more as we add partners and build out the open, generative platform that is live today and will be much stronger tomorrow.

To my closest colleagues on the Berkman Center/DPLA team — Maura Marx, Rebekah “The Bomb” Heacock, and Kenny Whitebloom in particular, and Robert Darnton, the university librarian — my virtual hat is tipped to you for years of hard work and inspiration.  You are the best colleagues I could ever wish for.  Thanks for what you’ve done.  Ditto to the entire Berkman Center team, led on this project by my great friends Urs Gasser, Colin Maclay, and Caroline Nolan.  You have proven, once again, what an unparalleled incubation space the Berkman Center can be.  Other members of Harvard’s faculty — Terry Fisher, Charlie Nesson, and Jonathan Zittrain — have led the work in special and constructive ways.  The tech teams, led by Jeffrey Licht at pod consulting, iFactory, and ThumbTack, deserve special thanks, too.  Every beta sprinter and app developer, making use of the newly open API, is just awesome; you will make the case for why the DPLA ought to be, at its core, a free and open platform with free and open metadata and content, to the greatest extent we can make it that way.  Our pro bono lawyers at WilmerHale have gotten us our 501(c)(3) status in what must be record-time, ready for launch.  (And Maura: you’ll be the Best Fed Ever at IMLS.  Congratulations on your major appointment.)

To every member of the Steering Committee, every member of the new Board, every member of the Workstreams, and everyone who has piled in on an event, listserv, hackathon, Beta Sprint, or meet-up: thank you for your partnership, goodwill, and contributions to come.  This is just the beginning — of something very big, if we can keep the band together and keep it growing.

Thanks, @electriclit, whomever you may be: it is a good day indeed.  May there be many more such good days in the future.

Digital Public Library of America, Session IV

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These are my live-blog notes for the fourth and final full session at the DPLA content and scope working session:

1) The messy issue of rights and permissions for in-copyright works is the biggest issue that the DPLA will face.  (We have a workstream set up for legal issues on the wiki.)  A variant of this issue: the DPLA could play a role in ensuring that usage rights for end-users are not as untenable (silly?) as the recently-announced HarperCollins’ 26 lends rule.   As another related point: We should have a legislative solution to tricky copyright restrictions in mind, as a proposal (or a package of proposals), but we need also to make progress absent, or at least prior to, legal change.  In addition to orphan works issues, there are copyright issues laden in scholarship associated with computation and massive data sets, as an example.

2) Don’t undercut public libraries as you build a Digital Public Library of America.  There’s a risk that the success of a #dpla might result in politicians and other funders seeing less utility in local public libraries.

3) The world is going mobile on such a massive scale.  We need to build that in from the start.  There are over 5 billion active mobile users.  Mobile broadband is growing in penetration, and nearly a third of users globally have a smart-phone.  In 2013 – 2014, more people will access information on the web via a mobile device than on a laptop or desktop.  We have to bring the DPLA to the people.

(Side-note: Dan Cohen has posted his #dpla comments to his blog.)

Digital Public Library of America, Session III

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Here are some quick notes on three take-aways from Session III at the Content and Scope planning meeting of the Digital Public Library of America.

1) Materials that are in copyright will have to be thought about by the DPLA differently (the red zone) from those in the public domain (green) or orphan works and gray literature (yellow).  But ideally the members of the public accessing the works would not know about these differences when approaching the content.  This issue leads to the tiering issue (or perhaps we need a different word) for DPLA.  From a user perspective, could we make it not matter whether the material, before coming to DPLA, was red, yellow, or green?  There are a variety of ways that might come to pass, including a possible alternative compensation model for books as a way to pay creators.  (For a proposal to create two types of alternative compensation system in a parallel field, music and movies, see William W. Fisher, Promises to Keep, Ch. 6).

2) A user may have multiple roles: on the one hand, may be an author who wants credit or payment for her work, and on another is seeking low-cost or free, unfettered access to the work of others.  And diversity of users becomes tricky when one adds the international access dimension.

3) A five-year (or other) moving wall strategy, in partnership with publishers, seems like an attractive possible approach to digitizing materials and making them available.  One might be able to enable payment for a series of years and then return the works to the public domain.  But there may be issues lurking here, too.

The moderator adds some more: a) the scope and content of #dpla must include materials that are not just in the public domain, which leads to sustainability and incentives; b) talking about services and lots of added values, with many players with multiple roles, where many people in the ecosystem of publishing, reading, and using information have a stake in the success of #dpla; c) library materials should be made available to the public in ways that are as free, open and useful as possible.

Digital Public Library of America, Session II

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My three take-away points/topics from the second session, focusing on characteristics of public domain collections and open business models:

1) We have done a lot of work toward collection-building in a DPLA.  We need to learn from the experience of our own projects in the United States and those of others that are underway today.  Europeana is an especially important reference point, as are many other current and past major mass digitization projects.

2) We need to avoid going it alone.  A shared vision and collaboration is crucial.  The time for doing “our own thing” in our own way is over.  The DPLA needs to aim to establish a system or a platform that will support collaboration across a broad range of participants doing relevant work who are willing to work together.  We need to respect the identities of those who have developed or hold content.  And a distributed library system can be very resilient and diverse and strong as a result.  We need to allow lots of people to succeed via the DPLA.  (One might consider what needs to be centralized, such as indexing, while having the bulk of the system, content, and so forth distributed/federated.)

3) Even sticking with public domain materials won’t be cheap or easy.  While some say “scanning is the easy part,” there are still major costs and challenges given the scope of what we seek to accomplish — and we need a model to sustain the work over time.  Digitization is very expensive, and almost exclusively grant-funded today.  And it’s necessary to get to a critical mass of information for it to be useful to users, which we can only get done by collaboration (see 2, above).  There are best practices that we ought to learn from with respect to scanning — and all else that we have to do, such as metadata creation and collection, user interface, search and discovery, etc.  Despite the exciting progress across many projects to scan much information, a business model for any DPLA that can mix open and paid is extremely important to develop for sustainability purposes.

One person adds two additional key points (related to mine, but said another way) from this session, so I add them here:

a) We can’t anticipate uses.  Stay flexible.

b) We need to think about standards and metadata as a core part of the enterprise.

Digital Public Library of America, Session 1 Notes

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Here’s my rough live-blog (while moderating; please excuse briefness) of the key points and problems from session 1 of the Digital Public Library of America working meeting on “Scope and Content” of a possible DPLA, today at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, MA:

1) We began with a voice from public libraries and one from research libraries.  The dichotomy broke down quickly, even as both focus areas seem important at the outset.  The group appeared to be in “violent agreement” as to seeing a spectrum of users rather than two completely disconnected categories (public/research).  The stronger form of this argument: perhaps we should even focus on activities/uses/functions rather than a sense of user identities if possible.

2) There is a key problem potentially in the way: we as libraries don’t have the ability to provide access to users to all materials that we previously could.  The digital age cuts against broad access in some ways.  Do we take on this problem, which is one of technology, contract, markets, culture?

3) There are three ways in which to see our current posture (at least):

a) We have what we need to build a DPLA.  Some say that we have what we need, and we just need get on with it.  The approach should be: “Buy what we can, scan what we can’t.”

b) Others disagreed with this view.  Law reform, they argue, is an important, necessary part of what we want to do.

c) Others still view that not only do we not have everything we need, it’s getting worse (see, in a way, the concerns that JZ builds out in the Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It).

We’ll round up these types of issues and discussion points and include on the DPLA wiki after the session.  Please join on in.  In the meantime, check Twitter #dpla for updates on the fly of the meeting discussion itself.

Collective Management of Copyright: Solution or Sacrifice?

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The Kernochan Center at Columbia University Law School is hosting its annual symposium today in NYC on the timely issue of collective management of copyright.

Non-IP lawyers may be scratching their heads after reading that sentence.  What, after all, is collective management of copyright?  Daniel Gervais, the opening keynote speaker, starts the conference by answering that question, as he has in much of his terrific scholarship (including his edited book on Collective Management of Copyright; see ch. 1, up to page 28).  Collective management, Gervais tells us, is a way to make the copyright system work in a complex world of many stakeholders.  A collective management organization (CMO) aggregates a series of rights held in private hands and then issues licenses on a broad, common basis to users.  The historical uses of this approach date back to the 1700s in France, when dramatic works began to be managed on a collective basis.  More recently, also in Europe, many CMOs have emerged to manage rights in a range of settings.  We also see collective management in the music business in the United States.

The reason that I’m particularly interested in collective management of copyrights right now has to do with books and other materials collected and distributed by libraries.  I am working, along with other colleagues, on the nascent idea of a Digital Public Library of America.  We are exploring how we might develop a way to make much more in the way of digitized works available broadly, through online or physical libraries, in a public-spirited way that ensures also that authors and other creators continue to get paid for their work.   The proposed Google Books Search Settlement, pending before Judge Chin in federal court here in New York, would be another example of a privately-orchestrated collective management system for books.  Our DPLA idea might well take the form of a collective management arrangement with tiered access to different sorts of data.

To answer the question posed by the conference title: I think collective management of copyright is generally speaking a useful solution to problems of fragmentation, scale, and complexity in a digital era.  These schemes are not perfect, and nor do they represent a panacea.  My view is that well-designed collective management schemes may well provide the best way to serve the shared interests of creators, publishers, and the public in the context of libraries and otherwise.  I am eager to work with others to explore how a collective management arrangement might help to establish a DPLA.

As a side note, we are releasing today a wiki where anyone can join in the effort of developing this idea.  For instance, see the page devoted to the track dealing with Legal Issues, seeded by Prof. Pam Samuelson of Berkeley Law and her team.

And thanks and congratulations to June Besek, Pippa Loengard, Prof. Jane Ginsburg, and their team and students at Columbia for this helpful and impressive conference.