"Tron" as metaphor for the digital library

In the Tron films, Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, enters a digital world 'inside the computer' by means of quantum teleportation (or 'digitization', as it's actually referred to in the 1982 original). Watching this recently, the demarcation of a digital world and the real world felt curiously familiar to working on a digital library. I wanted to use this post to explore a few other 'gaps' that exist in digital library development, aside from my target concern of that between collections and users, specifically the nature of the gap between digital and analogue worlds.

Behind the conceptualised information we get from our computer screen are a bunch of spinning disks existing in physical space, drawing on physical resources to support them. Ultimately we have a binary machine code making the machines operate - we use programming source code translated to binary to communicate and instruct the computer, and the resulting programs lead to user interaction and often the creation of something fully comprehensible to the human eye and brain. This conceptual level is several steps removed from the physical reality of IT systems, and it can be easy to forget. Similarly, in a space such as a library defined by analogue content, IT systems solutions implemented at the higher, conceptual level may lose touch with the physical reality of the library holdings themselves. Perfectly feasible systems solutions to the problems facing digital libraries can be found in the digital space, but they don't always bear any relation to the real world. This sort of apathy, if you like, seems to be mutual and it's far too easy for one world to forget about the other and remain disconnected.

In fact, this gap is only in the mind. Libraries have two areas that need to be addressed, which may appear paradoxical. The first is the obvious one: digital as 'paradigm shift', with more information on new formats, and where users of digital content have acquired new information gathering habits and expectations. The second is a bit more subtle, but there's nothing 'new' in digital. This observation comes from examining the phenomenon from the vantage point of human history: it's just a repeating pattern. As new technologies develop, paradigm shifts occur. It used to take a little longer, and the last one hundred years or so have seen a quicker turnover, but we should be used to this by now. This was a perspective shared by Thomas Hobbes, quoted here from James Gleick's The Information: "The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter." All the talk of the 'brave new world' of digital is nostaligic hyperbole that only serves to miss the point that it's all just information.

There's one other problem that digital libraries encounter that's worth noting here. Creating a digital library within a traditional library space throws into sharp relief the knowledge silos that exist there. They didn't particularly matter before, every person performed their separate function and it was enough to point in the general direction of a physical resource, because you would probably be able to find it. But the digital library brings together disparate roles, condensing them into a project that requires unprecedented precision, because computers demand it. In response to this, either everyone involved endeavours to develop a holistic understanding of all relevant institutional inter-relationships, or one person or department has to take on this responsibility. The latter introduces an instituional divide: instead of the integrated library that contains digital content and analogue linked together and fully amalgamated, we get two libraries - one digital, one traditional - with the digital element a 'bolt-on' or supplement, which may not be the best outcome for growth and sustainability, adding limited value to library collections as a whole.

A National Digital Library for the US

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books there's an article by Robert Darnton, Director of Harvard University Library, from a recent talk that opened a conference on the possibility of creating a National Digital Library for the US. His ideas on the library in the 'new age' are fleshed out rather more extensively in an earlier article from 2008, featured in the same publication.

In Darnton's writings he gives a laudible defense of the traditional book and library institution. This perhaps appeals more to a minority (even a small minority) in the current research climate, but it's an important argument that often gets drowned out. While agreeing entirely with the ideas of access and traditional preservation that he describes, it's a little concerning to see what has been left out of this discussion surrounding a National Digital Library.

To begin, it isn't just the 'modern' and 'postmodern' student who performs most of their research digitally - all the signs show that, within the sciences in particular, we are being inundated with born-digital material. We will find that even the most bookish scholar - should we decide to value his output sufficiently to archive it - will at least have left behind an email correspondence. Indeed, the first hits for 'born-digital data' via Google find an explanation of why the Crafts Study Centre at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design chose born-digital storage for the 'reusability of the resource', and an article in the New York Times praising Emory University's acquisition of Salmon Rushdie's digital files. It should go without saying that, meanwhile, the scientific community have long since entered the age of the petabyte.

While many books have indeed lasted many hundreds of years, they, like digital data, also get lost and destroyed - any advantage they have displayed in longevity doesn't seem to compensate for their limitations in time and space as research tools. With a focus on the printed book, dismissing born-digital as an 'endangered species', we are throwing out the majority of modern scholarship. It therefore seems that this approach will create exactly what Darnton claims to want to avoid: the library as museum. It's a museum of past research at the expense of the future, dictating the centrality of the traditional library when in fact the modern researcher expects resources to come to them, and not vice-versa.

Just digitising books is really only a part of the digital puzzle when it comes to libraries and, for the reasons mentioned above, doesn't reflect the current and future trends in scholarship. Nor is it a progressive response to the question of a National Digital Library: the first digital library started in 1971 with Project Gutenburg; the first ISBN issued to an e-book was in 1998; Google Books was launched in 2004. The push for digitization presented here sticks to a rigid hierarchy surrounding the supremacy of the book and simply doesn't accommodate born-digital (or even archival) content. Copying every book around is not going to address the most pressing concerns for a National Digital Library and will never further the scope of scholarship.

In a recent survey of 275 US insitutions (with a 70% return), the OCLC identified that special collections in the US were primarily concerned with issues of space, followed by born-digital content, and then digitisation. Only 50% of insitutions had assigned responsibility to born-digital collections. Ignoring born-digital collections and focusing on books does not take care of the problem, and while we'll probably have our Folger First Folios to consult for years to come, much of modern research will be left uncollected and unpreserved, and the real potential for new avenues in digital scholarship lost. It may well be that the scale of the problem does necessitate the creation of a new, exclusively digital insitution, but the realities of digital scholarship are far more dynamic than they're given credit for here.

A fear of the digital?

We've spent the last week examining various documents concerning the future of digital collections and their associated technologies in cultural institutions over the next couple of decades. Specifically, two of the UK's national libraries have recently attempted to tackle the subject in separate scoping documents: the British Library's 2020 Vision and the National Library of Scotland's report on the library in 2030.

I've noted recently that, based on my brief experience so far, many cultural institutions don't seem fully prepared for digital (whether culturally, strategically or technologically), but the idea that institutions might actually be afraid of embracing digital is a slightly different angle that emerged from some recent discussion surrounding these documents.

There are certainly a few reasons to be fearful of launching major projects concerning digital collections and infrastructure. The one that springs most readily to mind is the existing perception of the impending obsolescence of analogue media. "Throw it in the Charles [River]" was one scientist's recent response to the collection storage problem at Harvard College Libraries. All of us access and use different information in different ways, so as a blanket solution the notion would be a bit absurd, but the idea of obsolescence is a pretty powerful one, not least because those who hold it often appear to have more influence on outcomes than the institutions in question.

Libraries, in particular, are stuck with the problem of at once appearing to be 'vital' by embracing digital, yet not letting go of core cultural elements within their institutions that in many instances stretch back hundreds of years (like storing books). While the scientific community requires an increase in the quantity of born-digital material to continue pursuing cutting-edge experiments, the cultural sector doesn't need digital in the same way, but rather appears to see it as complementary to their original mission of preserving analogue cultural collections (mostly, these are digitised items, so a direct link remains to the analogue). Digital can certainly promote learning and access, but in some cases it may be a necessary evil driven by economic and political factors.

Perhaps fear is also reflected in a reluctance to handle the really big questions associated with digital collections within these documents. It's slightly frightening for some to think that we can't save everything - indeed, that we can't save most things - so who tackles the problem of what to save? Then, with the Digital Economy Act passed in the UK in April, copyright will continue to be a significant hurdle, but this isn't usually explored in much depth, if it's broached at all. Finally, who will manage these projects, and with what technology? Certainly, it's a big unknown, but perhaps it's better to shoot first and ask questions later, particularly when you're under attack.