inspired kitchen design ebooks
jonathan zittrain:well, good evening. hello. my name is jonathanzittrain, and i am so pleased to behere with you all today to hear from john palfrey onthe occasion of the release of his book, bibliotech-- whylibraries matter more than ever in the age of google. nicely focused group to getgoogle in there, as well. it's very nice, agoogleable term.
john palfrey: it's all seo. jonathan zittrain: yes. first just logistics--this is being recorded. so your image, if not soul, arebeing captured for posterity. it is not being livewebcast, but it will probably go up later unless somethingtruly substantively catastrophic happens. and what else should we know? we're going to go into around7:00, 7:15, at which point
there will be a receptionnext door that can also spill over ontothe outdoor patio, to which everybody is invited. and john has done abouta dozen talks so far on the road for thisbook, so our challenge is to ask him questionsthat he has yet to hear from the road,which is very exciting. he's spoken to a group assmall as about 30 or 40 at the andover bookstore,and as big as 1,000
at a conference calledcomputers and libraries? john palfrey: yes, that was. jonathan zittrain:good eponymous title, a solid non-focused group--computers and libraries. they ought to alternate everyyear, libraries and computers. anyway. john palfrey: i'll sendthem that suggestion. jonathan zittrain:yes, very good. so how to introduce john?
john is a lawyer-- that getsa chortle through the room. but that's ok, he's anunpracticing lawyer, unless you think of practicingin the larger sense. now, he did do a turnat ropes and gray before being rescuedby the berkman center. john palfrey: i wasthere almost as long as yochai benkler,who is also here. jonathan zittrain: ah. i forget that yochai alsodid a turn at ropes and gray.
good times. but john worked for the epafor a while, regional office. you were kind of in apolitical sort of role, yes? anything more you wantto tell us about the epa? john palfrey: nope. [laughter] jonathan zittrain: as you cansee, it was a political role. and john was executivedirector of the berkman center and was the one who reallyput the center into workdrive
and took it from a kind ofsmall place in a hallway to a larger place that met firecodes much better than it did before, and that really hadan inclusiveness to his way of running the place that hasbeen reflected in the substance that he has thought aboutsince, a book on interop and interoperability. and this in a way is abook about interoperability and thinking aboutthe mortar that cements the variousbricks we have together
in ways that keep civil society. that's so much, i think,of what john thinks about. and of course, day today now, after having done a turn as aprofessor here, director of the library here atthe law school, and now is the head of school atphillips andover, which he is in the process completelyreinventing and doing all sorts of cool thingswhich we might hear about. so john is justone of these people
who is not a podium thumper,doesn't shout to be heard. he simply has really persuasiveand interesting and thoughtful things to say, andthe kindest ethos, both at the institutionaland personal level, somebody that i findmyself going to for counsel and many, many others as well. and i have yet toreceive a bill. so that's how i know he'sreally not a practicing lawyer. so john, we're sopleased to see you.
note that in somequirk of things, there are exactly three copiesof this book available for sale around the corner. john palfrey: that's either agood sign or a really bad sign. but they will also, becausethey only have three copies, put you on the list to order oneon layaway at a 30% discount. so that's a gooddeal of the evening. john, you are 100% here. thank you so much forspending time with us tonight.
we're so excitedwhat you have to say. john palfrey: thank you so much. [applause] and thank you all for coming. this is very touching tosee such a great crowd. i feel like i'mcoming home in a way, and to see so manypeople that i've worked with, both at the berkmancenter and the harvard law school library and theharvard libraries broadly.
i'm truly, trulygrateful to see you here. this book that i havewritten is a love letter to libraries and tothose who work in them, the librarians in particular. it is also, i hope,an argument for why libraries are socrucial, especially in the age of google. and all of that i learned fromthose people in this room, and i'm really grateful forall of your help in doing it.
i'm going to try to talk forno more than 20 or 25 minutes, and then hopefullyget into conversation. i would love to hear muchof what is on your minds and be challenged,as jonathan said, with questions i haven'tyet heard on this book tour. this may the onlyplace on my book tour where somebody will knowwhat this actually is. is there anybody whorecognizes this picture? audience: your office?
john palfrey: no. it comes from--yes, [inaudible]? audience: oliverwendell holmes' library? john palfrey: yes,that's so great. this is the firsttime someone has known the answerto that question, and i ask it everywhere. this is the personal library ofoliver wendell holmes jr., who of course was a professor here.
but this was actually hishome in washington, dc. and i love this picture fora whole bunch of reasons. it reminds me of the harvard lawschool library and the awesome librarians and archivistswho work in it, and the fact that they digitizedthis amazing collection of oliver wendell holmes'. but it also to me is agreat challenge to all of us when we think aboutlibraries and the libraries of the future.
and the reason i see it as achallenge is this room to me is really, reallyappealing-- the idea that you could havea space in your home that is surrounded by books inthis way and sit in that chair and think of allthe great opinions that holmes thought up. now, we know hehad a few clangers and so forth, so hethought up some bad ones. and maybe he didn't do it here.
but just the idea that he wasinspired by sitting there. and for many of us, wework with young people. i now live with and workwith about 1,100 teenagers, and i think a ton aboutwhat inspires them. what kind of spacewould inspire them? what kind of alibrary space would? and for most of ourteenagers, my guess is that this might be acool and inspiring space, but for almost none ofthem would they sit up,
swirl around that chair,and then pull one of those off the shelf. for those of us who've worked inthe harvard law school library, i was always struck by thefact that we were almost always full as a library. cheek by jowl thosekids were there. very often theyhad those approved harvard law school library mugs. and they had a casebook, right?
and they were highlightingaway on the casebook, but they weren't doing aton of pulling statutes or other things offthe shelves-- almost never, at least in the bigreading room, literally never. and maybe if they had agreat reference librarian they might have found something. but by and large, they werethere for other reasons. right? they are there probablyright now studying away
for other reasons. and i think our challenge,in a way, in a digital era is to come up withsomething that is as powerful andappealing a space for kids as a learning space and asan environment in libraries. and i think that's thechallenge back on all of us who are trying to design andto create these spaces in an exciting way. and i think we do this againsta backdrop where libraries
are to some extent in peril. now, i stand in a room,i realize, at harvard, the place where unbelievablesupport for libraries exists. but even within harvard,we know that there are different schoolsthat support libraries at different levels. our dean is here. meet dean minow. thank you for being here.
thank you for being a lover oflibraries, not just evidenced by the fact that you're herebut because of all you do to make libraries great here. but even within thecontext of harvard, we went throughseveral year period of quite a bit of transition. and i was a part of that too. and we know that there aretimes when libraries are under a great deal of pressure.
that is true inacademic settings, and obviously this is adifficult context for many. but it's particularly true,i think, in public libraries. and as i've traveled aroundin school libraries-- the 100,000 or so schoollibraries around the country-- very often peoplehave a funny view that libraries aren't maybeas useful as they once were, which i thinkis exactly wrong, which is why i wrote this book.
this is a quote froman amazon review by somebody i do not know. his name is david weinberg. it is not davidweinberger our friend. but this was a notparticularly flattering review on amazon of my book, andit was disagreeing basically with the premise ofthe importance of it. but i thought it was aparticularly good view that sums up what somepeople think, and it
is a prevailing view out there. i realized often also wheni was reading the book that one of the most commonconversations that i had after becoming the director ofthe harvard law school library was one at a backyardbarbecue or a cocktail party, and someone wouldcome up to me and say, so what are you up to? and i would say,i'm just becoming the director of this library.
and then two seconds laterthe person would interrupt me and say, oh, waita minute, libraries aren't as useful anymore. you're the digital guy. you're getting rid of them. you're getting ridof all the books. and then they'dhave walked away. in this sense, i never had thechance to kind of grab them and say, no, no, no, librariesare more important than ever
and here's what we have to do. and so that's why iwrote the book in a way, was to answer that questionfor all those people who walked away from me at parties. they're not probably goingto be reading the book. i get the irony of that. but i still felt i hadto win the argument. but i say it in aserious tone, which is we recognize that inmany communities, when
there is a choice betweenmoney for police and fire and education and otherimportant things-- and this is true in myhometown now of andover, too-- the library doesn'tget as much support. the support is eroding forlibraries in these communities, and i think we need toreverse that polarity. we do this also, though, ithink, in the context, at least in the united states,of an amazing culture of support for librariesand a history of support
for libraries. this image comes from ourhometown of boston right across the river. every time i seethis i get chills down my spine, theidea of free to all; the idea that the big municipalpublic libraries started right here about 150 years ago,and with an incredibly simple democratic premise--the basic idea that information should be free, knowledge shouldbe free, to anyone, regardless
of their ability to pay. and this was something thatis in the cradle of the athens that we created here inboston, the middle of our city in copley square. and so we have ahistory of making this kind of amazingsupport for our communities, for our democracies. and part of what i worryabout in this moment of peril for libraries is that wewill lose sight of that,
and that oddly, weactually might backtrack. we might actually have lessaccess in our democracy to information in the digitalage than in an analog age. and that would be terrible. that would be, ithink, perverse. i think that's true fora variety of reasons. and a simplisticversion of that argument is to say, increasingly, asknowledge moves to the cloud, one could imagine it beingvastly more available,
that anybody withone of these devices could get access towhatever they wanted. but there are a couplereasons why that's not so simple or so true. one is if you look at theowners of the cloud in essence, they're almostall private firms. they're almost all parties thatare private companies and doing it for profit-- whichis not a bad thing, and this is not ananti-corporate screed so much
as to say publicspaces in cyberspace have been things thatwe've had to win. it's what jonathan zittrain andyochai benkler and the berkman center have had to create andreally care for and establish. as we hurtle to acloud-based environment, by and large we turn to privateplayers like amazon and others to store our stuff. so in a very simplemode, if we increasingly create our materials andput them in private hands
as opposed to, say, in thepublic hands-- or roughly speaking, public-spiritedhands of libraries and the research universitiesthat have libraries-- i think that is adangerous thing. there are many other waysin which it's tricky, and we can come back to that. but i think it issomething worth worrying about a little bit. there's a way to makethis a bit more precise,
which is for those who'veworked in libraries, you know that it's notalways possible for libraries to do exactly in thedigital age what they've done in the physical age. one of the ways in which this istrue is the lending of ebooks. so by and large,publishers have made it tricky to lendebooks on the same terms that you could lenda physical book. this is where itis relevant that we
are at a school, of course,because in fact they're treated in two really different ways. the background law forlending stuff like this is actually really, really good. the background copyright, ina simple sense, is positive. which is, librariesfor hundreds of years have been able to buysomething like this and then do moreor less whatever they wanted with it, right?
you could bring it toa secondhand book shop and sell it, or you couldlend it as many times as you wanted oryou could tear it up or you could digitize itand do lots of things. but it turns out that ifyou get that same book and you put it onone of these devices and a library is wishing to getit on terms that it can license to someone else, all of asudden it is governed not by the background copyrightlaw so much as it is governed
by the contract law thatthe company sets up, the publisher setsup with the library. and for all those who'veworked in libraries, you know that you can't alwaysget e-books on as good terms as you can get physical books. and some of the outcomesare perverse and bizarre, like you can't read it aloud. those are some of theworst of the terms. some of the other termshave been the 26-lend rule.
does anybody rememberthat great offering from a publisher,the notion that you could get one of these forwhatever the full price was and jonathan and i could lendit back and forth 26 times, and then of courseit would go away because it would have worn out. that premise didn'twork out all that well. the basic idea, though,is that it has not been possible for librariesto get digital materials on as
good a deal, orin fact, as often, as they could getit in physical form. and this, i think, isa dangerous premise. it's also the casethat when it is a contract between thecompany and the library, there's also somethingtricky behind it with respect to the ability to store itover a long period of time too. so if the pointis we're paying it as though we were leasing forit, when we stop paying for it,
it could go away. so in fact, librariesmight in fact not have collections if we wereonly turning from owners of the informationand the knowledge into those who areleasing it, or renters. and many peoplehave worked on this from many different angles. here, i would say, in the cradleof the open access movement. that is one great answerto it, where at the fas
level and bob darnton andothers led the effort there, and at harvard lawschool, where we've committed to putting ourmaterials in the commons in an open access way. that's not such a big deal. but for the vast majority ofwhat is created and published, we actually have potentiallya less good arrangement going forward if we don'tchange the deal that is being offered for digital materials.
just out of curiosity, ifyou were reading something, how many people still preferthis, a hard-copy kind of book? vast majority. how many people prefer an ebook? relatively few. and how many people aremore or less agnostic, you kind of do both? interesting. i think that may be thegrowing group actually,
is those who want toread this at night but carry this on a plane. i think that's kindof the growth of it. oh, stuart schieber, alsothe open access champion. i'm sorry, i didn't yousee you there before. congratulations and thank you. but the basicpoint being that we need to ensure thatin a digital age there is just as much accessfrom a democratic perspective
as there's been, if not more so. so this picture showsa moment in time when we were actuallybuilding that boston public library, when we were puttingup this amazing edifice in the middle of copley square. it was a few decadesafter the library started. it was 1890. and the reason ilove this picture is because i think that's,roughly speaking, the moment
we find ourselves in now. we have a moment where weare building for the future the next set of libraries. and it is a setof libraries that will exist both in digitalform and in physical form. and i think we actually oughtto be thinking about this in architectural form. so does anybodyrecognize this one? a lot of people workin this building.
this is a side elevationof langdell hall. and it is to my mind themoment that we're in right now, which is where we areconvening together, i think-- or ought to beconvening-- those people who think about informationarchitecture and the importance of the digital eraand how we actually frame and makeaccessible information with the analog era. i think that future willbe a hybrid of libraries
that are very much physicalspaces, but also which connect to the cyberspacethat we are creating. and i think in order to dothat well, what we need to do is actually convene allof these people together and actually work in a waythat is much more collaborative than we've done in the past. one of the ways in whichwe've been doing that-- and many people in thisroom are to thank for that; bob darnton called together agroup of 40 people at radcliffe
institute a few years agoto convene an effort really to say, can we in factcome up with the design for a combined publicand private effort to create a combinedhybrid digital and physical infrastructure? that has become the ideabehind the digital public library of america. 40 people in that room actuallyagreed to this sentence, "to create an opendistributed network
of comprehensiveonline resources." and that's sort of acrazy ambitious thing that nobody thought in factcould work, but somehow it has. and rebecca haycockand many people here have made it come together. i think it's oneexample of what we can do to solve this problem. ok, so pause therefor a second and say, what are the elements ofa library in a digital age
that the digital public libraryof america and other things might be able to bring about? i think fundamentally,libraries remain about people. so i think that thecrucial aspect of libraries is keeping the humanityin the transaction between people and information,people and knowledge. i think one of the challengesthat people often throw out about libraries is we don't needthem so much, because people can help themselves so easilythrough these kinds of devices.
one example ofthis that struck me as i was writing a book aboutthe importance of librarians happened in a small-townlibrary in andover, mass. i was editing one chapterand it was about 3:00 in the afternoon. a whole pile of kids camein after school, which is a fun thing that happens. libraries fill up withstudents who are spilling out of schools when they close.
and the kids all went into theteen section, and some of them were doing their homework andothers were gaming and doing other things. and one of them was tryingto do a science thing. and the kid turned tohis iphone he said, siri, what doesterminal velocity mean? this was in themiddle of a library. and siri, it turnedout, did not know what terminal velocity meant.
but like three feet awaywas an amazing librarian. and i was sure that that womancould have either told him exactly what terminal velocitymeant or at least shown him-- probably better--the way to find out about terminal velocity. you see these examplesover and over again, but i think it isimportant to note. and this is one of theaspects of this book that is a little challenging.
there is a tough-lovestory here, which is when westudy young people and how they lookfor information, librarians are prettylow on that list. the project informationliteracy studies are probably theclearest in that zone, that kids often do lookto google and wikipedia. they often lookto their teachers in that particular class.
but we have to do abetter job, i think, as librarians and people whowork in libraries, to ensure that kids actually do goand use these resources and know to do that,and we actually have to prompt them to do itand to teach them to do it. but i start with thehumanity as a key element of libraries in a digital age. second, i thinklibraries have to shift from being standalone silos--which i think there have been
lots of reasons for themto be-- to being platforms and to being connected entities. so this, i think,invokes a lot of the work that yochai has done inthe wealth of networks and otherwise. if you think about thehistory of libraries, go back thousands ofyears to the library at the palace ofebla, for instance, in modern day syria, orthe library of alexandria--
the idea behind thelibrary in a way was you broughtall that material. whatever you couldget, you brought it to a particular place. and now you may thinkabout it as bringing to a particular school,a particular zip code, all of those materials. and that was understandableas a previous iteration of libraries.
i still think to some extentwe do that, and too often i sometimes hear of schoolsbragging about how many volumes they have or how much theyspend on their libraries in order to attractkids or people. i think that misses the point. i think it misses the pointthat by working much more together and actuallyby seeing libraries as a connectedseries of platforms, as part of the network, theycan accomplish much more.
this particulardesign of a platform is the dpla's roughstructure, the digital public and the key to it,in a way, is the fact that it is just a wholepile of open source code with a whole pile ofopen metadata and as much open access material asyou possibly can have, and a bunch ofdifferent parties. in this case, servicehubs are states by and large, content hubs arethings like harvard university.
thank you, [? sara ?]thomas and others for contributing material in. and the ability to export ona bulk basis for anybody who wishes to do it. and as you see from thetop, the notion that nobody has yet figuredout the right way to present librarymaterial in a digital age. and the point isthat we can have lots of potential frontends.
we can have lots of differentapplications and ways to share our materials,especially if we think of them as platforms, pool thematerials together, and make it possible throughan open api, an ability to create any front-endthat you would like. so today there is one wayto get it, which is dp.la. you could go on your mobiledevice or your computer, and you can find asearch engine and a way into all of these materials.
but likewise, if yougo back a screen, that's just thisparticular front-end. i think the ultimatesuccess of the project is that any library couldcreate on this open api the ability to find a betterway to do this presentation, to find a way topresent this material. and any library could create anapplication or a front-end that would in fact make itso that nobody even knew that the dpla was there.
the dpla could be,ultimately, entirely plumbing, and the success be in the wayin which different communities have presented this material. that's a very different wayof thinking about libraries as institutions, but it'sabout taking advantage of what the miraclesof the web have made possible and that magic. and that, i think, requiresus to be a little bit less egocentric asinstitutions and much more
seeing it as a way to share. as of right now, just a smallplug for where the dpla is. we have filled up about a thirdof the map in terms of places contributing materialsinto this digital public the red states-- isuppose that's maybe not the colors we should haveused for this in this room-- are the ones that do have upand running-- actually it's perfect, harvard colors, inthat way-- have service hubs. so if you look atmassachusetts, we
have the digital commonwealth. and if you think about whatthe digital commonwealth is, it's a fabulous example forwhat the rest of the country could do. so at the bostonpublic library there are people like [? i, ?]tom blake and a team, and what they do is they go outto all the 351 cities and towns in the commonwealthof massachusetts and help them digitize materialsand add metadata to it,
and then share it upthrough a statewide portal. what the dpla does is itcreates a way to share that on a national basis. so if you imagine,if every state had a digitalcommonwealth equivalent, we would in fact bebuilding for the country an amazing series ofon-ramps into something that everybody could access. we're about a thirdof the way there.
dan cohen, who's thecurrent executive director, and others are doing a fabulousjob of filling out this map. if you happen to come from anyof these states that do not yet have a dpla hub andyou'd like to be one, let us know because we canget you signed right up. the other thing that'simportant to look at are these yellow ones,the content hubs. those are the biginstitutions like harvard and others-- bless you-- whoare in the process of digitizing
tons of material and making themavailable in this particular way to the rest of the country. and my hunch is, if we couldhave every institution doing what the national archiveis doing and doing what smithsonian is doing andnew york public and harvard and so forth, we wouldbe creating potentially the most amazing library thathas ever existed in the world. and that, i think, is avery exciting premise. much of it does comefrom the work of people
who are literally in this room. this is the oliverwendell holmes suite, which is all of thosematerials, including that first image that i showed. and if you think aboutthese collections that once were called hiddencollections at harvard-- they were sort of hidden away indifferent places-- i think even if we just put themon the web and we have people comefind them, they're
still a little bit hidden. and i think part ofthe key to the step that we're taking rightnow, and particularly as we take amazing collectionslike the oliver wendell holmes collection and other ones thatare extremely well-curated and shared, we canmake them unhidden in this same network modelby putting it in the dpla. now, of course, we shouldcaveat the problem of copyright. we'll come back to that later.
but subject to any licenses thatwe have that we can share it, i think putting thingsin this shared repository makes them much more valuable. second, i think that bydoing it in this way, in an open way with an openapi as a chance for people to be able to do anything theywish with the information, we'll be able to unleasha whole lot of innovation. so this is an old schematic, butone that came from the harvard library innovation lab.
i'm going to give acouple examples from that. you may think about librariesand worry about some of the things wewould lose if we were to go in a digitaldirection, which we continue to. i think one of those fearshas been serendipity, the idea that if you do nothave physical libraries, you don't actually have a shelf. you don't have a place whereyou can go and get a call number
and walk in and finda book you want, and then see all thoseother amazing books that are to the right andthe left of them. and you probably allhave that experience of coming out with 10books when you thought you were coming out with one. and i think that'sone of those things that we don't wantto lose when we go from physical librariesto whatever future
we're going toward. my hunch is thateven if we contract those stacks a little bit--and we shouldn't contract them anymore than wealready have, just to be clear-- we actually cando some things that introduce new forms of serendipity. we actually might beable, in a hybrid world, to do better than we havedone in just the analog. and why is that?
one reason, to takethe harvard example-- what is the current countof harvard libraries? is it still in the 70s? 73? audience: 73. john palfrey: 73 distinctlibraries within a system. the fact of the matteris, when you also add in the depository25 miles away, there's actually nostack at harvard.
there's no placewhere you could walk in and see all the books, allthe collection, in the system. so if you could imaginea world in which you have the stacks that arefabulous ones in widener and here and langdell and soforth as one place to walk in, but you also could combine allthe materials from all those 73 libraries, plus all thematerials in the harvard depository in a virtual sense,and create a virtual stack, you could have newforms of serendipity.
you could actuallyfind connections that were not previouslypossible or findable. this was an example. stack view was arendering, a way to put all of theharvard collection together, as you may know. this was based on2009 circulation data, so circulation datafrom a long time ago. and the basic ideawas very simple.
the idea was youcould then search on different forms ofmetadata that people have added into their collections. so in this particularcase, someone is searching forgravity's rainbow, and they can see how manytimes that particular book has circulated in acertain period of time. but you also might see thatanother book has circulated much more frequently.
you could alsosearch, of course, if you're a graduate student,how many of your professors have checked out thisversion or another. you could imagine ifit were the illiad and we had 40examples of that, you might want to search onwhich of those translations or which of those forwardswas most important. you could imagine ways in whichall of that great metadata that librarians have could becomemore valuable if it were
a combination of the digitalwith the physical in somebody's hands. and i think that is thepossibility that lies ahead of us, and why thisresearch and development effort, particularly on top ofopen systems, is so important. i would add one other examplethat i think is crucial. also in the harvard libraryinnovation lab is perma.cc. for those who haven't followedthis particular effort, i think it's anamazing example of why
libraries have a crucialrole to play going forward. i've talked mostlyabout the importance in a democratic societyof access to information, and i think that is reallythe primary one for libraries. but i think preservation ofinformation and preservation of where theinformation is found is equally important inmany respects for libraries. one thing i fear is that ifwe don't actually think ahead to the kinds ofsystems that we ought
to have for thelong-term, we're going to make an enormous mistake. i think perma.cc isone example of how we can create permanentforms of digital archiving, and where librariansactually can lead in a way that we have notone as much before. this is a project thatis currently ongoing. i know jonathan and histeam-- we could talk about it afterwards, so i won't explainit entirely, and leave you
the chance to do it. but i think it's an example ofthe amazing innovation that's happening in libraries, andthe importance of libraries playing this role. one of the challenges that we'veput out to libraries in general is if you think aboutin the information era in the lastseveral years, i don't think most of thebig innovations have actually comeout of libraries.
so if you thinkabout search, that has come out of, obviously,big companies like google. if you think aboutrecommendations, by and large that hascome out of big companies like amazon and netflix, maybe. if you think aboutencyclopedias, that came out of acommodity trader's head, and a bunch of people arecollaborating in wikipedia. lots of other examples of it.
but i actually thinklibraries have not been on the forefront ofthe very big innovations, and i still think that liesahead as a possibility. and with a series of opensystems and collaboration, i think that's entirely,entirely possible. i'm about to bring itin for a landing, so here's the windup to that. i think ultimately, the thingthat libraries need most to do and where i thinkmost of the excitement
is actually solving a series ofproblems that face communities. and as i go around the countrytalking about this book or in the context ofdpla, it's so clear that from many,many perspectives, libraries have a crucialrole to play in communities. and that could be very simply,providing access to kids after school when they don'thave another place to access information becausethey actually don't have a broadband connection at home.
you hear many kids gettingassigned kinds of homework that they actually can'tcomplete without being able to go to a library. and i heard from kids who at6:00 when the library closed then had to go tomcdonald's or starbucks, because that's wherethe free wi-fi was. i think there's an enormouslypowerful role in bridging this participation gapand the digital divide from the library perspective.
i think that's truefor job seekers. it's true for people who arenew immigrants to the country. i think it's true forelderly people who come to libraries as a social place. these are hugely important rolesthat libraries continue to play outside of the scholarly realm. and i won't go throughall those examples, because everybody knowsthem so well here. i think in the end we do needlibraries as physical spaces.
does anybody recognizethis library? audience: the johnadams library? john palfrey: yes, the johnadams library in quincy, mass. they're just suchamazing spaces that have been created in libraries. so my argument inno way is to say that we shouldn'thave physical spaces, glorious physical spaces,in our communities. i think librariesplay an essential role
in creating third spacesthat are open and public. i just think thatpeople may come to them for different reasons, andwe may need to support them for very different reasons. one thing you see aboutthe adams library-- you can imagine atthis table that these were big reference tomes. i don't think peopleare necessarily going to come to a libraryfor reference tomes.
they're going to comefor other reasons. and i think part of our job isto figure out what those are. i think we will continueto have physical books. my argument is not in anyway that we won't actually have physical and beautifulobjects that present material. i'm not positive that the marketwill be exactly as it is today. my sense is we will have verybeautiful physical objects and things that present in largesizes and in beautiful formats, and we will have mostlydigital materials otherwise.
i think things will bemostly born digital. i suspect that e-books willpress on that paperback market or the market ofless beautiful objects, but i think we stilldo have a material culture that people like. and even kids seem to continuelike those physical objects, so i don't thinkthey're going away. but we do have tofigure out a way-- how do we support librarieswhen patrons hold up
their hands just the wayyou did in this room, many saying i prefer the paper, somesaying you prefer the digital. and with a trend towardincreasingly digital, one of the things thatwe have put libraries in such a toughposition with is saying, with the same amountof money or less money, you have to do both the digitalstuff and the physical stuff. that is an untenable position. we've got to figureout a way, whether it's
through collaborationor continuing to support through fundingor it's capital investment, to allow librariesto be able to thrive in what is going to beboth physical and digital as a world. i think we should do it in aglobal context, to be sure. and this was one of the partsof bob's genius and others as we started out withthe digital public yes, of course, it's beenseen as a national effort,
but it's been done in aninternational context. the united states is actuallynot the first country to come up with a digitalstrategy for their nation. the europeans actually aremuch further ahead, at least time-wise, in the form ofeuropeana, as an example. and very much the firstthing that dpla did was to find a way towork with the europeans. and the notion wasnot to say, we're just going to create oneworldwide library or one
worldwide digitallibrary of alexandria, but to say we can actually havemaybe 200 different countries having theirs, but figure outhow to make them interoperable. how do you ensurethat from the user perspective people actuallycan access these materials? so one of the firstthings dpla did was to create anexhibit on immigration that showed peoplegoing from the old world to the new and thenew world to the old,
to ensure that as we builtthis system it would actually work on a global level. we have the diversityand the difference and the innovation that happensin all these different country levels, but we actuallyconnect it in a global vision. and in some waysmost importantly, i put up here a map of utopia. you can see it here. my view is we shoulddream really, really big.
this is the momentwhen we are designing what public libraries andscholarly libraries and school libraries can and shouldbe for the future. and i am not so pollyannishto say that we are absolutely going to become a utopia. that's not the point. but the point is we shouldhave something that we actually are building toward in mind. it should be a sharedvision that we're
really excited about. and i feel like that'sentirely, entirely possible, to put that vision ahead of usand to build as much toward it as we can, and tosay that we are not going to accept a digitalworld or a digital hybrid with the physical world that'sactually less good than what we've had in the pastin terms of access, in terms of preservation,in terms of commitment to democratic ideals.
and i think that it's anextremely exciting moment to come together. so i hope verymuch that you will share your questions with me. but most importantly,thank you for being engaged in a discussion aboutthe future of libraries. and i look forward toworking with all of you to make it very bright. thank you so much.
thank you indeed for thissparkling call to action. we should takequestions, comments. so hands are going up. microphones arewith dan, at least. so dan, get it going. and feel free totell us who you are. john palfrey: andargument's most welcome. hard questions go to jonathan. audience: good evening.
my name is[? yungtan kamensky. ?] i'm an incoming studentat simmons gslis, and i was intrigued bythe discussion of trying to replicate serendipityin the digital world, particularly the slidewith gravity's rainbow, looking at metadata while tryingto replicate the experience of viewing items on a stack. has anyone looked atdoing the opposite? and what i mean istaking the digital
and putting it in thephysical stacks, probably through augmented realitytechnologies-- maybe something as simple as qr codes. people all have fancy littlecomputers in their hands. it seems to me there'dbe some way to do that. jonathan zittrain:oculus library. you'd be staggering around. you could do it right hereand just pull stuff off. is that the idea?
audience: something a littlebit less cumbersome, hopefully. john palfrey: soundslike a fabulous project, and a great one for you to doduring your master's degree, for sure, or phd--whatever comes next. in a serious way,i think the group that i've heard most talkingabout this kind of thing around here-- isjeffrey schnapp here, or others who worked withthe library test kitchen? this is very muchthe kind of thing
that group was working on. i would restate a little bitwhat i was trying to say, which was notentirely to replace to take the physicalexperience and put it online but really to rethink what thecombination of those two things would be. and i think that'sexactly your point, which is some of the thingsthat might actually work would be lookingat what are some
of the pathways thatpeople use today online that actually couldsupplement or augment the physical? and i think that's whereexcitement would lie, would be that interfacebetween those two and trying to make anexperience that could be better than what we've had to date. jonathan zittrain: canwe navigate the mic up to the next place?
here's one from armand, too. we can alternateback and forth, so. bob darnton: john,i would like to ask a self-interestedquestion, because i've just writtensomething about that is an attempt at an answer. jonathan zittrain: and youshould, just for the record, identify yourself, bob. bob darnton: i'm bob darnton,university librarian.
what do you think should be thetop priorities for the library of congress, and whatshould the new librarian, who will assume his or herposition on january 1, do? john palfrey: thats'a wonderful question. well, professor darnton, ithink the first thing that should happen is that thepresident should invite you to take up thatpost in a few months now that you're available,which i think would be fun. i think the nextperson should do
a couple things that i thinkthe library of congress has not done. one is, in a fundamentalway, to see itself as a national library. and i think the library ofcongress in some respects has dodged that for a longtime, by saying in part it's a researcharm of the congress and in part it's our nationallibrary, but not quite. i think you haveto grab it and say,
this is the national library,and we are not the whole thing but we are connectedto the rest of it, and should actuallyplay nice with the rest. and to say that there in factis a really positive role that the library of congresscan play in an interconnected and networked world. i think that would be one. i think two wouldbe then-- so that's sort of a conceptual shift,but an important one.
and two would be to takeon mass digitization in a meaningful way. so i think thatpeople have often pointed to the worlddigital library and the 11,000 or so objectsthat have been digitized it it. that's too small a number,i think, for internet scale. and i think for an entitylike the library of congress to take up this jobof mass digitilization and to work with thenational archives, which
has been hard at work at it,the smithsonian, the gpo, lots of other partiesin the government, and actually lead thateffort-- i think that could be enormously powerful. a third thing wouldbe join the dpla. so one of theabsurdities, i think, of the process we'vehad for five years is that we have thenational archives, we have the smithsonian,we have the gpo,
we have lots of other federalagencies participating. and yet, the libraryof congress has resisted our invitations forall that time, which seems to me bizarre. anyway, i couldgo down the list. but i think the opportunitiesfor leadership-- particularly inthe digital realm, but in that combinationof the digital and the physical--could be enormous.
jonathan zittrain:wherever the other mic is. john palfrey: ah, dean minow. martha minow: dean minow. john, it's just sofabulous, the book. everyone should buy it. don't take the 30% discount. just give him all the money. john palfrey: you seewhy we love our dean? martha minow: well,it's such a great book
because you open upwhat the possibilities that the digital worldoffers to open up libraries, while identifying what thetraditional libraries have that are at risk. my question to youis really threefold. one, what business modelsdo you see going forward that can make the vision real? secondly, whatlegal changes would be necessary and feasibleto make the changes real?
and the third is, aren't therepossibilities that we never saw before, likemakerspaces, where the interactivity betweenthe digital and the physical may open up somethingwe never had before? john palfrey: those arethree awesome questions. so the first one, whichis the hardest one, is the business model question. my view is that by andlarge, libraries shouldn't have to have a business model.
so by and large,there is a public-- look at that. that's so good. basically, i thinklibraries are a public good. and i think thatthe business should be that through ourtaxpayer dollars we should supportpublic libraries. and the united statesreally is the leader. and actually, bostonreally has been
the leader of thatsince the bpl opened, then lots of small-townlibraries-- all those great hh richardson buildingsthat look like sever hall and look like partsof the law school, those are the early formationof the public library system in the country. and then of course there'sthe carnegie libraries that spread out1,600 communities wide in the early 20th century.
so i think they shouldbe publicly financed, by and large. i do think that philanthropyhas a huge role to play, and one of the argumentsthat i make in the book is to say that, at momentsof key transition-- as mr. carnegiedid; and there are lots of reasons tocriticize carnegie, but one thing he did washe put a lot of capital into libraries that spreadthem from big cities
into lots of small townsat a crucial moment. so i actuallythink it'd be great if the carnegie corporationor the macarthur foundation or others wouldin fact stand up and say, this is a moment to do abig investment of that sort. after that, i think one ofthe questions is to say, should librariesbe in the business of selling stuffor having a revenue model that looks otherwise?
i think that libraries,archives, museums, are all asking thesekinds of questions. there are, of course, thingsthat we can license and make some money on. this library here, of course,has made some amount of money on royalties by virtue oftaking materials we had and digitizing those, allowingpeople then to sell them back to us or other libraries. i think there'ssomething in that.
but i would much rathersee a business model that was focused oncollaboration, and one that was focused on openaccess and other things that i actually think wehave the seeds of here, rather than see itas something where we actually have to have acorporate-style business model. but others may disagree. second of the three questions,about legal changes-- i think just tostate it really fast,
orphan works legislationshould change. so to bob's question,one of the great things about the library of congressis that position overseas, the register of copyrights. so the library ofcongress could stand up and say, look,really simply, nobody is hurt by having orphan workslegislation-- tens of millions of works that could bemade available that are not being made available.
and if somebody finds thatthey're the copyright holder, they then will be able toput it back into copyright if they wish to, or not. and in fact, i just can't seehow orphan works legislation doesn't really help everyone. section 108 reform--there are special rules that relate to libraries. there are special rules thatallow libraries to do things, for instance, for those whohave different abilities-- so
for the blind and otherwise. there are specific rules thatare way out of date and ought to be reformed. so we've gone a certaindistance on section 108 reform. we could go furtherand so forth. so there are a seriesof things, i think, in that area that are crucial. and the other pieceof legal reform that needs to be tied tothat is privacy reform.
i think libraries havedone such a great job of being the places wherewe protect reader privacy. we need to ensure thatthe law allows libraries to do that on an ongoing basis. and last, makerspaces--yes, for sure. one of the things youpushed me to do when i first took this job was to focuson co-production, the idea that libraries are spacesin which we are producing new knowledge of various sorts.
makerspaces are one example. the new media labs popping uparound the country are another. i think they're greatexamples of bringing people into libraries tocreate new knowledge. i feel like that's theexcitement of having an open applicationprogramming interface layer, and so forth, which isin-person and from afar we can create new thingsthat have never existed. yeah?
audience: hi, john. pat mccormick, formerstudent, kennedy school grad. i can't wait to read the book. so excuse me ifthis is in the book. john palfrey: noproblem. [inaudible] one way or the other. audience: ok. i'm very interested in the apiand the platform and all that, but my question is more mundane.
in the city wherei live, somerville, we're struggling to keep librarybranches open, to restore them, to create new spacesthat aren't traditional. and it seems likethis concept would allow us to open a library withfewer books-- assuming we have the platform as well;that's not to say we don't need the books--in different spaces to restore historicbuildings and reuse them in different ways.
and i was justwondering the extent to which you'vethought about this as a way of creating moreflexibility, lower cost barriers for physicallibraries in our cities. john palfrey: that'sa great question. and i understand somervillehas a fabulous new librarian. you've got-- it'san exciting moment for somerville in particular. so my preferred answer wasthat we fund libraries fully,
and that they have a fabulousphysical infrastructure and branches that are open. actually, one of the thingsthat boston public library did was introduce the branchsystem, as well-- so have lots ofcommunity-based libraries, and support them well. i think the reality is thatwe don't in communities often make that full investment. and i think that's where wehave to say, so what can we do?
how do we embrace this futurewhile also doing as much of the fabulous existingstuff as we can? i think the only answerthere is to collaborate, is to say that wedon't need to bring the same collection to everyone of these physical spaces. librarians, of course, have donethis very well for a long time with interlibrary loanand with a variety of other forms ofsharing, but i think those can be amped up anddone more extensively.
and of course, asi've argued, i think from a digitalperspective, every library should not be creatingits own ipad app. not every libraryshould be creating its own various digital systems. that is somethingthat we can, if we take a page enough out ofthe open source movement, do in a collaborative way. and i think that wouldallow for communities
to make choices as to how theyspend what are scarcer dollars. so would i rather seefewer books in libraries? of course not. but i think where we haveto make that choice-- do as much collaborationas possible to allow as muchchoice as possible. jonathan zittrain: over here. did the mic find a new home? audience: hi, my nameis ron [? newman. ?]
i've been using librariesfor about 54 years. i wanted to come back to thatslide and what it represents. it's very seductive. on the other hand, it also showsa limitation of physical stacks as they are now, which isthat a book, as it comes into the library, gets onedewey decimal or library of congress number andforever that's the one place where it is. in a digital systemyou can do better
than that, becausethat book can sit on many different shelf lists. is there opportunityfor some sort of wiki kind of cataloging systemto emerge from this so that many people cancollectively catalog material better than one person can? john palfrey: there'ssome people laughing. tracy, do you want that one? no?
tracy does not wish it. anyone else? audience: [inaudible]. john palfrey: yeah, exactly. so if somebody in the harvardlibrary system liked it-- jonathan zittrain: itwould be fitting to have the answer crowdsourced. john palfrey: yeah,that's exactly-- audience: i certainlythink that we
have catalog systems that doallow different kinds of access points. and they may not be asseductive and as appealing as this kind ofdisplay, but they are initial and in some waysrudimentary attempts to combine digital information andphysical information into a wide variety of indexesthat give the user lots of ways to get into it. the problem is they'rea little too complex.
and so we stillneed to keep working at figuring out howto make it both simple but complex at the same time. john palfrey: my answer-- tracyknows vastly more about it than i do, and from atechnical perspective there are a zillionchallenges behind it. but i think from a conceptualperspective, the idea that there's one indicator forsomething in an old-school way, as compared to saying you couldhave many more data points that
allow different ways into it, ithink that conceptual shift is actually very, very important. and i think the trend,which is moving away from having the knowledgebe in a particular catalog or a particular catalog entryto one where in fact there are many more ways toidentify the information and then do more with it, issort of an obvious movement. marcy murningham: myname is marcy murningham, and my questionpertains to the theme
of hybrid and collaboration. there are vast pools offinancial assets swimming around every community,billions and billions of dollars in the form of assetsunder management for tax-exemptinstitutional investors. in theory, thosetax-exempt institutions exist to advancethe public interest. that is the reason fortheir tax-exempt status. and boston, as we know, isvery rich in those kinds
of institutions. according to my research, thetop 60 tax-exempt institutions in boston have combinedassets of over $50 billion. there are ways, itseems to me, for tapping into some of thatmoney and bending it toward the publicinterest-- that is to say, institutions such aspublic libraries that otherwise rely ontaxpayer revenue streams or even philanthropy.
i'd just encourage youto think more creatively about revenue sources thatcould be bent toward libraries in our nation's communities. john palfrey: thank you. i think that's very thoughtful. i would imagine that oneof those is this one, is harvard and others. also one school that hasa fair amount of capital, not the same amountthat this one does,
but i think that'simportant to note. i think one of thereasons why i think it's incumbent uponthis institution to do things like openaccess, to do things like digitize its materialsand share them more broadly, even though there's nota revenue stream back to this institution,is because i think we are privateinstitutions that have a public purpose.
and i think if we don'tsee it that way we're making a huge mistake. whether or not there would bea tax on these institutions that then goes backto public libraries, i'm not sure that that'snecessarily right either. but i think that it's avery interesting question, and i think it's one thatwe have to figure out how we are justifying,in a sense, holding this amount ofcapital in a relatively
small number of institutions. jonathan zittrain: over here? erica charis: hi. my name's erica charis,and i'm a librarian over at berklee college of music. john palfrey: awesome. audience: the ideas thatare something in my head that i'm hoping to hearwhat your thoughts are on, if libraries are aboutpeople and libraries
are becoming moredigital, how do we bridge the gapbetween the kid talking into his phone and thelibrarian sitting at the desk three feet away? what does digital servicenecessarily look like? i suspect manypeople in the room have great thoughtsand answers to this. i think part of it isactually as teachers that we actually haveto tell that student
to go talk to that person. we need to make thathuman connection happen. i've been teaching unitedstates history this year to a group of 14 kids whoare in their junior year of high school, and i thinkone of the things you do is assign kids to gotalk to a librarian, and to have theminterface therefore with all these amazingthings as part of a paper. and i think that kind of thingthat many professors do here
at the law school[inaudible] actually say, in the course of working onsomething you actually must go spend time with the librarian. i think that's actually areally positive thing to do, and i think it createsconnections and pathways that are essential andactually breaks down what is happening, whenin the digital world we sometimes withdraw. even though we thinkit's more social,
sometimes we're withdrawing,away from human contact. so i actuallythink, as educators, in some sense we haveto construct ways to bring people back together. now, could it be-- go ahead. i would love to hear-- jonathan zittrain: i thinkyou might be about to say what i'm going to ask you. john palfrey: so why don't yousay what was on my mind, yes?
jonathan zittrain:suppose apple comes to you with a proposal for your advice. and apple says, you know what? we'd like to improvethe siri experience. the easiest part ofsiri is to answer the 20% of possible questionsthat 80% of the people ask, which is like,what's the weather going to be tomorrow or-- john palfrey: what's thescore on the red sox game?
jonathan zittrain: exactly. or, i'd like to buy a book. maybe that won't happen. but anyway, there's abunch of other questions that are long-tail questions. what if the way that weused to route letters that children wrote to santa andaddressed to the north pole-- and they got sentsomewhere, right? i think they still do.
they go to people whoanswer the letters? i don't know what theliability policy is. but what if similarto that, we simply arranged for peopleasking siri to route those two reference librariansaround the country or the world who would then answerthrough the siri pipeline and be attributed to it. by the way, this is broughtto you courtesy of a library. and if you'd like to be moreabout it, blah, blah, blah.
what would yourreaction be to that? is that like, no, no. that's exactly the kindof corporate mediated dehumanization thati rail against. or would it be, thisis exactly the kind of public-private partnershipthat would put libraries back at the center of the meaningfulquestions people ask? john palfrey: so i will answerthat if i can ask my friend yochai to answer after ido, because he's much more
about that kind of system-- jonathan zittrain: yochaiis playing the role of siri in this. john palfrey: this is theadvanced cold call request to my friend in a moment. i was really interested-- didyou see the new york times article about iswikipedia in trouble as the numbers aredeclining and so forth? jonathan zittrain: they runthat article about every year.
john palfrey: they do, butit was in the sunday review this week. we're seeing a littlebit more serious. it wasn't a greatarticle, but anyway. so here are a couple of answers. i would be hesitant to do thatparticular deal with apple for the reasonyou're suggesting, which is i worry thatif what we keep doing is creating systemsthat do not have
the library as theprimary interface, whether it's a publiclibrary or a research library or a special library or a schoollibrary, i am troubled by that. so the deal with apple makesme nervous for a really, really simple reason-- jonathan zittrain: so themodel is free to all, so long as you come through our doorway. john palfrey: right. well, so long as youdon't necessarily
have to come throughapple's doorway, right? so if it were done in atruly open source way, i could imagine thatbeing very attractive. if it's onlythrough siri or it's creating a systemthat relies upon siri and the iphone as opposed to anandroid device or [inaudible]. jonathan zittrain:you could imagine it building into the dplaas part of that stack and have an api callto ask a librarian,
and siri can plug in, andgoogle now can plug in. john palfrey: that would bemuch more interesting, for sure. but i wouldn't do a deal--and i just think of apple as the ultimate inexclusive-- somebody has written aboutthis too, as have you. so yes, but only according to astructure that was truly open. one thing that we've talkeda lot about with dpla that's a fun ideawhich is like this is the idea of the scannebago.
i don't know if peoplehave heard this idea, but it's called the scannebago. i did not come up with it. emily gore whoworks at dpla did. but the idea of the scannebago-- jonathan zittrain:he's making emily gore be the recipient of thetrademark infringement letter. john palfrey: no, no. the idea of the scannebagowould be to get a winnebago
and put in the backof it a scanner and drive it around the countryand have people bring out the materials thatthey have to scan them, and then the peoplewho were driving it would help put in themetadata and do the scanning. and you could imagine thedocumentary or the npr piece sort of writesitself, this notion of driving around the country. and you could imagine it tappinginto library students, people
who just care about libraries,the sort of wikipedia equivalents. you could see it also reallyappealing to retired librarians as something that people coulddo as part of this network. and i actually think aboutwhen reference librarians retire, what are someof the things that would be really fun to do? it might be occasionally to bein this particular role, which i think the dplaactually could mediate
in a really interesting way. so i think there isa version of what has made wikipedia so successfulthat we could do for libraries. it'd be really,really fun frankly. you think about wikimaniacoming to a place like this, as it dida bunch of years ago. having dpla fest be a placewhere people showed up and actually edited metadataand answered questions. it would be really--
jonathan zittrain: it's likea collective antiques roadshow content. john palfrey: yes, incrediblygeeky and incredibly fun. jonathan zittrain:but there'd be a triage area atthe beginning to see if there's a copyright problem. john palfrey: well,there could be that, too. jonathan zittrain: you'dturn away a lot of stuff. john palfrey: thatcould be true, too.
jonathan zittrain: thesehardy boys are too young. john palfrey: [inaudible]risk with respect to the copyright, which wouldbe an interesting conversation. y john palfrey: areyou willing to-- yochai benkler: jet lagfrom being away for awhile notwithstanding, i'll try. something that came out in theexchange between the two of you and the scannebagois let's not talk
about the corporateculture of apple and siri. let's talk about theisolation of the interaction with the machine. and you had saidsomething earlier about the humanexperience of the library. you talked aboutthe kids coming. and as you start to talkabout the scannebago and who would comeand who wouldn't come, i'd love to hear more from youabout what the human platform
element is, which is quitedistinct from the dpla platform, is muchmore like that, and is a form of a response tothe siri question that's about. even if it were fine fromthe corporate perspective, it takes the serviceaspect of the library and makes it availableto isolated individuals. and the question is, canyou say a little bit more, either from the book or yourexperience with how you're thinking about buildingthe library at your school,
about what it is that we do tosupport that human interaction that librariestraditionally have provided, and how thatconnects, if at all, to this very powerful responseyou began with martha's question of, don'tneed a business model, you need a story about thecore of the public service and about the coreof human interaction? can you put a little bitmore flesh on those bones? john palfrey: so this is whathappens when you hang out
with your old professors. they answer your questionwith a hard question back. i totally didn't miss thatthat's what just happened. i was hoping to glean some ofthe brilliance of yochai in it, but we got it ina different form. so thank you. so the hard question, ithink, is an important one. so step one, frommy perspective, is the notion ofhumanity, which is
i actually think thatif we lose the notion of the incredible, incrediblegroup of people who work in libraries-- this is wherethe love letter starts-- and the experience of somebodywalking in-- whether it's a scholar or it's a kid or it'san old person, whatever it is-- that is a hugelyimportant, i think, democratic interactionthat actually doesn't have to do with the transaction. it doesn't have to do withthe transaction in the sense
of netflix wants you to thinkabout this movie instead of this movie. it has to do withpeople in a community supporting one another anddoing what is civic work. so there's something that'sjust essential about that. and no matter how quickly wehurtle towards the digital, i want to be surethat that humanity is in the mix in areally fundamental way and that we don't lose it.
so that is really,really crucial to it. your question, though, alsogoes to what is the role of the librarian going forward. i would say in thetough love category in this book is actuallysaying to my friends who work in libraries andothers that i actually think the shift we have tomake is to see librarians as not necessarily workingfor a single institution so much as working in the publicgrid in a networked way, right?
so there are about100,000 school libraries in the united states. there are, call it,15,000 public libraries and call it another 10,000or 15,000 other kinds so we're talking aboutmore than 100,000, but not 150,000, institutions. to the extent that eachof these institutions had some percentage--if it's one person or it's a percentageof somebody's time--
which is really devoted to thisnetwork public effort, i think, would be vastly more powerfulthan as isolated institutions. and i realize that's a shift. that would besaying to the dean, you're paying for people tobe focused on your professor, supporting the professor writingthis great book on cooperation or whatever it mightbe-- you actually have to divert a certainpercentage of that to something thatis the public good.
and by the way, itwill boomerang back in really awesome ways. and actually, thisis a bad example because i think this dean hasmade exactly that enlightened decision at harvard law school. but i think if every librarywere seeing itself in that way, i think that couldbe very powerful. i think there are lots oflibrarians in this room who actually lived that experience.
but i'm not positive that that'sexactly what every institution sees itself as doing as everytown library, every school library, and so forth. but i think thatnetworked approach could be enormouslypowerful in ways that we haven't yet experienced. and i feel like it's takingsome of the learning that has made the exposureon the web so exciting and the kinds of things thathave developed from that,
and having thatapply in the library space for all theseamazing principles all this amazingmaterial that i think is so exciting forwhat could come. jonathan zittrain: in boththe book and the presentation, you've managed to kindof capture your optimism without beingpollyannish about really what's so valuable about thelibrary and the community it represents.
but you also manageto put in at least two potential snakesin the gardens that are really worrisome. you did a little riff onwhat we'd call the first sale doctrine that says the anchor,the platform of that library, for hundreds of yearshas been the idea that once you've gotthe physical artifact, you can lend it to someoneelse, which also became the anchor of thephysical community
because you had to go to thelibrary to fetch the book. so much of just thatlending is part of it. and you pointed out thata bizarre paradox, but not a necessary one, aboutdigital advancements is, congratulations, now we havea way of locking this stuff up tight where i might have aprivilege if i could figure out how to unlock it, but i can'tfigure it out and unlocking it itself may break the law. so that seems like onesnake in the garden.
i just wanted to see, ifyou follow the dotted line, do we end up with moreand more stuff locked up as fewer and fewer of these getproduced, because the economics are just so simple? you also said at the end, thesemight be interesting artifacts, but they're not going to bemass-produced the way they are even still today. and the second snake in thegarden is how you find stuff, that previously theway to find stuff
was through categorizationsdone by librarians who had professional ethicsand responsibilities about how to order stuff andtruly try to make it accessible without wonderingabout who paid them for product placement on the shelf? and now, as you say,again and again we're going to google, one ina handful of companies, for all information,not just monographs. follow that dotted line out,and do you see any difference
from the trend that'salready kind of overcome us of not going to the libraryor the library system for that kind of categorization? those two snakes in the garden,if that's what they are-- what do you do about them? john palfrey: i think thatis a very good summation, and maybe that's wherewe should end so people can go do something else. but i think--
jonathan zittrain: they'regoing to [inaudible] next door while eating. john palfrey: i'm soglad. [inaudible]. that's good, since this isa celebration of libraries. no. i think those twosnakes in the grass, as they went their waythrough, are huge risks. we didn't talk about the entiremass of the rest of copyright and the difficultyof doing something
like dpla given thestrictures of copyright, so i think that's more likean elephant in the room than a snake in the grass. it's so obvious. but i think thesetwo, the notion of the absence of adigital first sale doctrine and the requirement thatlibraries increasingly become leasers as opposedto owners-- when you combine that with the sort ofgeneral corporatization--
this is something thatgoes back to the earliest days of the internet, andwhat james boyle and yochai and others who are writingabout the enclosure movement. i think those are things,those are lessons, that we've learned in otherparts of our scholarship that we have to apply overhere in the world of libraries, and actually seek tobend the arc of where the future will go,or the future that will be history will go.
i think that's a really,really important thing for us to stand up and say, wedon't want that version of what the future could hold. and one of the reasonswe don't want that is because i think itwill undermine support and i think if we underminesupport for libraries and we don't support themin the way that we should, i think that willundermine our democracy and i think it will underminescholarship, which of course,
are not unrelated also. and so yes, i thinkthose two snakes making their way throughthe grass are worrisome. i don't know how to meldthe elephant stomping around with snakes. you're better at thesemetaphors than i am. jonathan zittrain: no, i wasjust thinking of a mark twain quote, that everybody alwaystalks about the weather but nobody ever doesanything about it.
and john, you're a greatexample of somebody who is both talkingabout the environment that we're in, and notjust remarking upon it but building theactual structures, the roles you've played in eachof these examples-- of course, something you wouldn'tnaturally trumpet. but you have just been socrucial to all of this. and for those reasons, it's notjust what you're writing about but what you'redoing that we are
so lucky to have you in themix, and all of the things that you've done for us. so if you'll allow usthe uncomfortable moment of thanking you forall your hard work. john palfrey: you're very kind. thank you, everyone. and thank you tothe berkman center and to the harvard lawschool library for hosting. i look forward toseeing you next door.
thank you. jonathan zittrain: thank you.