©ollectanea

I have just returned from a nice 2 week stay in France where I conducted a little research on the French attitude towards the future of libraries in a networked world. In light of the scathing book Jean-Noel Jeanneney, President of the Bibliotheque Nationale, had written earlier (Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge) criticizing American digitization efforts spearheaded by Google, I wasn't all that sure what I would find. But, I've concluded that the bell curve obtains in France just as it does here in the USA (the long tail doesn't describe everything). French libraries are all over the map with respect to their attitudes towards and adoption of strategies to define their futures.

While I was there, Google announced its first francophone (french-speaking) library partner, the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). In commentary on the French blog, "Under the Duster," it was noted that the Swiss had not spent a cent to digitize their patrimony: Google numerise en Suisse romande - Sous la poussiere. I have no basis to judge the accuracy of such a statement, but it does not surprise me. The effort to digitize cultural history is overwhelmingly huge. It requires support from every sector. It can't be accomplished by governments alone. It can't be accomplished by libraries alone. It can't be accomplished by Google alone. It hasn't taken very long for us to figure this out. I think it's time for us to move beyond critiques of those who are making the effort and start to think about things further down the road, as Don Waters suggested in a recent essay about strategic thinking regarding our efforts to facilitate open access to scholarship. The availability of long-forgotten books online, or at a minimum, the availability of information about them and where they can be obtained, is a dramatic change and we need to start thinking about the implications of this and how to best take advantage of it.

Finally, it's important to note that the European Book Search partners have limited their participation to books in the public domain. This is not a surprise -- no other country in the world has a fair use provision like ours, or, therefore, an opportunity to argue the merits of mass digitization for books still in copyright as a fair use. We are on our own here, completely. Very American.