As the Clinton administration, Congress, corporate executives and others discuss the rapidly evolving "information superhighway," James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, called attention to the key role of the nation's libraries in this project:
If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.
At last count, there are some 4,600 college and university libraries in America, some 9,000 local public libraries and some 87,000 libraries (often called "media centers") in the public and private schools. And there are hundreds of specialized business libraries and federal and state libraries.
All told, some 182,000 professionals work in libraries. About 4,700 of them work in the biggest library of them all, the Library of Congress, with its vast collections (102 million items, including films, maps, prints, drawings, videos, CD-ROMs, newspapers, manuscripts, journals and books in 450 languages), its intake of 7,000 items a day and its online "card catalog" with 28 million entries, now available worldwide via the Internet on LC MARVEL.
Where do all these people and tangible assets fit in the new Information Age? At the Library of Congress, we regard our own key collections as the nation's "strategic information reserve" -- as part of the digitized intellectual cargo of the 21st century that will be moving out on the information superhighways.
We also see a long life ahead for the book; books are user-friendly and portable. We believe that Americans will be reading Shakespeare and Huckleberry Finn on the printed page many decades hence -- and reading printed newspapers and magazines as well. But, if all goes well, the Library of Congress will also be receiving and organizing vast amounts of new materials (under copyright deposit) in already digitized form -- films, music, encyclopedias, legal records, maps, scientific papers, government documents, all kinds of data.
For preservation purposes, we will get periodicals and books in digital as well as paper formats. At the same time, the Library, alone or in joint ventures with the private sector, will be digitizing some of its most useful existing paper and film materials for dissemination via the information highway, while duly protecting intellectual property rights.
The Library has already created electronic versions of two dozen of its key American history collections -- our Mathew Brady Civil War photos, 19th century pamphlets by African American writers, Thomas Edison's films of New York City at the turn of the century. We are now testing the pedagogical usefulness and appeal of this "American Memory" archive in 44 schools and public libraries. With Bell Atlantic, we will be testing its appeal on- line to Bell customers in Northern Virginia next spring.
And we will be doing new digitization experiments in the future. We will be working with both public and private sector specialists in developing standards for information retrieval. We will be networking with others so that materials digitized by one library may be available to many, as in the case of the Leonard Bernstein papers that we obtained last year.
Our basic belief is that if the new electronic highways are truly to serve America, they must do more than offer entertainment and high-priced information on demand to the well- to-do at home or in the office. Such a strategy would forfeit the technology's great potential for national progress and create information "haves" and "have-nots." Few Americans now lack entertainment or "infotainment," thanks to television, but many lack inexpensive, easy access to the knowledge they need to learn, work and prosper.
This is where the libraries come in. Technical people talk about "information nodes" -- places where a vast variety of information services can be accessed. That is what libraries already are. Suitably staffed and equipped, these local institutions can provide access for all Americans, rich or poor, to online services, either free or at reduced fees negotiated collectively with the providers. Librarians are uniquely skilled at organizing, finding and providing information; these professionals can play a key role as "knowledge navigators" guiding the information-seeker to relevant data bases and hence to relevant books and vice versa.
Just as they now assist millions of students, scholars, businessmen, public officials and plain citizens searching the paper record, librarians can do the same, on an even higher level, as their clients confront the digitized record. On a small scale, many libraries are already doing this, along with special research services and document delivery.
America's unmatched system of libraries can vastly multiply the benefits to be derived from the digital library and the information superhighway. But the good health of libraries cannot be taken for granted. Many, including the Library of Congress, are hard-pressed financially; new public monies must be invested in modernization, reequipment, and staff retraining. Only then can libraries play their proper role. In order to supply the rich intellectual cargo needed on the information super highway, the Library of Congress and other great archival repositories must obtain both the mandates and the money to digitize and organize that small part of the vast paper record of the past that will be most useful online to the most people.
There remains the crucial question of cost. Right now, in its infancy, digitization is still expensive --ranging from $2 to $6 per page of text, depending on the refinements. Private commercial firms are creating a vast parallel array of digital multimedia materials outside the libraries; but these efforts, inevitably, avoid most materials that do not seem to have broad market appeal. The costs of digitization for libraries must first come down before Americans can realize the full noncommercial possibilities of the superhighway, Fortunately, both public and private sector researchers are working hard on this problem.
This is a time of experiment, of occasional hypertalk, of rapid technological change, of congressional proposals, of tentative planning and increasing dialogue. The Library of Congress last July held a major conference of all interested parties, with Vice President Al Gore as honorary chairman, to discuss "Delivering Electronic Information in a Knowledge-Based Democracy." We plan to keep meeting and discussing the key issues -- updated regulatory structures, copyright, access, content, privacy, financing digitization. If we remember the overall public interest and use common sense, all these issues can be resolved.
I am optimistic that, with leadership from both government and business, the lift that the new information technology can give to our society will in fact take place. I believe that the new technology, properly employed, can spur learning and provide vitamin enrichment to once-isolated schools and community libraries. The information superhighway can give us through libraries a new boost, born of access to knowledge, that will feed the intellectual curiosity, entrepreneurial energy and civic spirit of Americans in the 21st century.
