Peter Sinclair: Free words at stake in free world of internet

Chances are, if someone has a nice profitable applecart, the internet will come along and upset it.

E-commerce continues to make waves without making money. We've witnessed the havoc it is wreaking on the grasping old infrastructures of the music industry. Now the same treatment is undoubtedly ahead for the cosy motion-picture club as cheap, universal bandwidth becomes reality.

Next up, it seems, are book publishers - and they can't wait for the bandwagon to roll. Excited by the smell of money, these staid litterateurs also want some electronic action, and if they have their way the days of the "fair use" doctrine may be coming to an end. As far as they're concerned, there's only one big problem ... librarians.

In a nutshell, publishers want to start charging people to read stuff; librarians don't. At stake is the survival of both groups.

The latter see their traditional role of research and guidance enhanced by new technology. They believe the public should continue to have easy - and free - access to the information in their keeping.

The publishing community, on the other hand, doesn't want these existing rights extended to the electronic world, says formidable former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder ("I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both"), newly hired at $US370,000 ($848,450) a year by the Association of American Publishers to deal with (and, hopefully, to) the librarians.

The nub of the problem is the ease with which material can be copied and disseminated in the electronic age. Eyeing the Napster-monster that is rampaging through the music and film industries, "publishers have to figure out a way to charge for electronic material," the Washington Post reports Ms Schroeder as saying.

Periodicals, in particular, are easily pillaged. "One library buys one of these journals and they give it to other libraries," she says.

With e-publishing a certainty in future, crisis looms.

But the president of the American Library Association, Nancy Kranich, bewails the fact that "fair use" - whereby the public has traditionally been able to duplicate limited amounts of material for informational purposes - has been "narrowed to the point of disappearing in the digital arena."

Ms Schroeder may have her work in the slash-and-burn department cut out for her, given that the image of kindly, bespectacled librarians in cardies is almost as iconic as apple pie.

Or will she just be hastening a decline that is already well-advanced? The library is no longer the first place people think of when they need to know something - it's more likely to be Google or AltaVista. The Association of Research Libraries says reference inquires fielded by librarians has plummeted in the past two years.

As they see public focus shifting away, there's evidence of a librarian fightback in the US. The monumental Library of Congress and its associated libraries - academic, public and governmental - plan to maximise libraries' traditional skills by launching an always-open global reference desk from June.

The Collaborative Digital Reference Service will update the old hands-on research role of the trained librarian, bringing a new and binary relevance to a profession with traditions dating back over 2000 years to Alexandria.

Book-biz organisations taking part at this stage include Yale, Harvard, the National Library of Canada and that of Australia. This new network aims to stem the erosion of the library system's client-base to the alternative Ask-an-Expert services that proliferate online.

Ms Schroeder and the publishing industry are determined that, somehow, they are going to make the reference service pay for the information they provide.

It is a clash between two conflicting world views; a collision between then and now. The Copyright Wars look like heating up as the year unfolds.

BOOKMARKS


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* petersinclair@email.com

Links


Recording Industry Association of America

Motion Picture Association of America

Patricia Schroeder

Association of American Publishers

American Library Association
Google

Altavista

Association of Research Libraries

Library of Congress

Collaborative Digital Reference Service
The Library of Alexandria

Yale
Harvard

National Library of Canada

National Library of Canada

Ask the experts

ProFusion

MagPortal

Terra-Server

Britannica

Adobe PDF Search

New York Times

US Patent Database
Standard & Poor's