1 00:00:03,780 --> 00:00:05,670 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Well, good evening. 2 00:00:05,670 --> 00:00:07,220 Hello. 3 00:00:07,220 --> 00:00:08,950 My name is Jonathan Zittrain, and I 4 00:00:08,950 --> 00:00:12,620 am so pleased to be here with you all today 5 00:00:12,620 --> 00:00:16,379 to hear from John Palfrey on the occasion of the release 6 00:00:16,379 --> 00:00:21,150 of his book, BiblioTech-- Why Libraries Matter More Than 7 00:00:21,150 --> 00:00:22,930 Ever in The Age of Google. 8 00:00:22,930 --> 00:00:25,470 Nicely focused group to get Google in there, as well. 9 00:00:25,470 --> 00:00:27,240 It's very nice, a googleable term. 10 00:00:27,240 --> 00:00:27,580 JOHN PALFREY: It's all SEO. 11 00:00:27,580 --> 00:00:28,538 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Yes. 12 00:00:31,232 --> 00:00:34,360 First just logistics-- this is being recorded. 13 00:00:34,360 --> 00:00:37,760 So your image, if not soul, are being captured for posterity. 14 00:00:37,760 --> 00:00:41,600 It is not being live webcast, but it will probably 15 00:00:41,600 --> 00:00:44,060 go up later unless something truly substantively 16 00:00:44,060 --> 00:00:45,610 catastrophic happens. 17 00:00:45,610 --> 00:00:47,790 And what else should we know? 18 00:00:47,790 --> 00:00:51,309 We're going to go into around 7:00, 7:15, at which point 19 00:00:51,309 --> 00:00:53,350 there will be a reception next door that can also 20 00:00:53,350 --> 00:00:56,055 spill over onto the outdoor patio, 21 00:00:56,055 --> 00:00:59,290 to which everybody is invited. 22 00:00:59,290 --> 00:01:04,560 And John has done about a dozen talks so far 23 00:01:04,560 --> 00:01:08,190 on the road for this book, so our challenge 24 00:01:08,190 --> 00:01:10,940 is to ask him questions that he has yet 25 00:01:10,940 --> 00:01:14,160 to hear from the road, which is very exciting. 26 00:01:14,160 --> 00:01:17,120 He's spoken to a group as small as about 30 or 40 27 00:01:17,120 --> 00:01:20,240 at the Andover Bookstore, and as big as 1,000 28 00:01:20,240 --> 00:01:24,194 at a conference called Computers and Libraries? 29 00:01:24,194 --> 00:01:25,360 JOHN PALFREY: Yes, that was. 30 00:01:25,360 --> 00:01:27,026 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Good eponymous title, 31 00:01:27,026 --> 00:01:32,150 a solid non-focused group-- Computers and Libraries. 32 00:01:32,150 --> 00:01:35,090 They ought to alternate every year, Libraries and Computers. 33 00:01:35,090 --> 00:01:35,620 Anyway. 34 00:01:35,620 --> 00:01:37,495 JOHN PALFREY: I'll send them that suggestion. 35 00:01:37,495 --> 00:01:39,070 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Yes, very good. 36 00:01:39,070 --> 00:01:40,400 So how to introduce John? 37 00:01:40,400 --> 00:01:47,920 John is a lawyer-- that gets a chortle through the room. 38 00:01:47,920 --> 00:01:51,160 But that's OK, he's an unpracticing lawyer, 39 00:01:51,160 --> 00:01:53,730 unless you think of practicing in the larger sense. 40 00:01:53,730 --> 00:01:55,460 Now, he did do a turn at Ropes and Gray 41 00:01:55,460 --> 00:01:57,524 before being rescued by the Berkman Center. 42 00:01:57,524 --> 00:01:59,190 JOHN PALFREY: I was there almost as long 43 00:01:59,190 --> 00:02:01,384 as Yochai Benkler, who is also here. 44 00:02:01,384 --> 00:02:02,300 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Ah. 45 00:02:02,300 --> 00:02:05,840 I forget that Yochai also did a turn at Ropes and Gray. 46 00:02:05,840 --> 00:02:07,980 Good times. 47 00:02:07,980 --> 00:02:13,930 But John worked for the EPA for a while, regional office. 48 00:02:13,930 --> 00:02:17,221 You were kind of in a political sort of role, yes? 49 00:02:17,221 --> 00:02:19,220 Anything more you want to tell us about the EPA? 50 00:02:19,220 --> 00:02:20,011 JOHN PALFREY: Nope. 51 00:02:20,011 --> 00:02:20,610 [LAUGHTER] 52 00:02:20,610 --> 00:02:23,090 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: As you can see, it was a political role. 53 00:02:23,090 --> 00:02:28,230 And John was Executive Director of the Berkman Center 54 00:02:28,230 --> 00:02:32,000 and was the one who really put the center into workdrive 55 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:35,660 and took it from a kind of small place in a hallway 56 00:02:35,660 --> 00:02:39,350 to a larger place that met fire codes much better than it did 57 00:02:39,350 --> 00:02:45,860 before, and that really had an inclusiveness to his way 58 00:02:45,860 --> 00:02:48,790 of running the place that has been reflected in the substance 59 00:02:48,790 --> 00:02:52,680 that he has thought about since, a book on interop 60 00:02:52,680 --> 00:02:53,706 and interoperability. 61 00:02:53,706 --> 00:02:56,690 And this in a way is a book about interoperability 62 00:02:56,690 --> 00:02:59,800 and thinking about the mortar that 63 00:02:59,800 --> 00:03:02,750 cements the various bricks we have together 64 00:03:02,750 --> 00:03:05,610 in ways that keep civil society. 65 00:03:05,610 --> 00:03:07,980 That's so much, I think, of what John thinks about. 66 00:03:07,980 --> 00:03:10,240 And of course, day to day now, after having 67 00:03:10,240 --> 00:03:12,590 done a turn as a professor here, director 68 00:03:12,590 --> 00:03:15,870 of the library here at the law school, and now 69 00:03:15,870 --> 00:03:20,500 is the head of school at Phillips Andover, which 70 00:03:20,500 --> 00:03:24,880 he is in the process completely reinventing and doing 71 00:03:24,880 --> 00:03:27,930 all sorts of cool things which we might hear about. 72 00:03:27,930 --> 00:03:29,790 So John is just one of these people 73 00:03:29,790 --> 00:03:36,400 who is not a podium thumper, doesn't shout to be heard. 74 00:03:36,400 --> 00:03:41,050 He simply has really persuasive and interesting and thoughtful 75 00:03:41,050 --> 00:03:44,890 things to say, and the kindest ethos, 76 00:03:44,890 --> 00:03:47,040 both at the institutional and personal level, 77 00:03:47,040 --> 00:03:51,510 somebody that I find myself going to for counsel 78 00:03:51,510 --> 00:03:53,830 and many, many others as well. 79 00:03:53,830 --> 00:03:55,250 And I have yet to receive a bill. 80 00:03:55,250 --> 00:03:58,510 So that's how I know he's really not a practicing lawyer. 81 00:03:58,510 --> 00:04:00,760 So John, we're so pleased to see you. 82 00:04:00,760 --> 00:04:03,960 Note that in some quirk of things, 83 00:04:03,960 --> 00:04:08,581 there are exactly three copies of this book available for sale 84 00:04:08,581 --> 00:04:09,330 around the corner. 85 00:04:09,330 --> 00:04:10,270 JOHN PALFREY: That's either a good sign or a really bad sign. 86 00:04:10,270 --> 00:04:11,228 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Yes. 87 00:04:11,228 --> 00:04:13,670 But they will also, because they only have three copies, 88 00:04:13,670 --> 00:04:18,410 put you on the list to order one on layaway at a 30% discount. 89 00:04:18,410 --> 00:04:21,480 So that's a good deal of the evening. 90 00:04:21,480 --> 00:04:23,310 John, you are 100% here. 91 00:04:23,310 --> 00:04:25,520 Thank you so much for spending time with us tonight. 92 00:04:25,520 --> 00:04:27,127 We're so excited what you have to say. 93 00:04:27,127 --> 00:04:28,460 JOHN PALFREY: Thank you so much. 94 00:04:28,460 --> 00:04:32,220 [APPLAUSE] 95 00:04:33,630 --> 00:04:35,090 And thank you all for coming. 96 00:04:35,090 --> 00:04:37,330 This is very touching to see such a great crowd. 97 00:04:37,330 --> 00:04:39,010 I feel like I'm coming home in a way, 98 00:04:39,010 --> 00:04:41,132 and to see so many people that I've 99 00:04:41,132 --> 00:04:43,590 worked with, both at the Berkman Center and the Harvard Law 100 00:04:43,590 --> 00:04:45,750 School Library and the Harvard libraries broadly. 101 00:04:45,750 --> 00:04:48,380 I'm truly, truly grateful to see you here. 102 00:04:48,380 --> 00:04:51,330 This book that I have written is a love letter 103 00:04:51,330 --> 00:04:54,410 to libraries and to those who work in them, 104 00:04:54,410 --> 00:04:56,125 the librarians in particular. 105 00:04:56,125 --> 00:04:58,030 It is also, I hope, an argument for why 106 00:04:58,030 --> 00:05:00,650 libraries are so crucial, especially 107 00:05:00,650 --> 00:05:01,850 in the age of Google. 108 00:05:01,850 --> 00:05:04,440 And all of that I learned from those people in this room, 109 00:05:04,440 --> 00:05:07,542 and I'm really grateful for all of your help in doing it. 110 00:05:07,542 --> 00:05:10,000 I'm going to try to talk for no more than 20 or 25 minutes, 111 00:05:10,000 --> 00:05:11,708 and then hopefully get into conversation. 112 00:05:11,708 --> 00:05:14,200 I would love to hear much of what is on your minds 113 00:05:14,200 --> 00:05:15,700 and be challenged, as Jonathan said, 114 00:05:15,700 --> 00:05:19,090 with questions I haven't yet heard on this book tour. 115 00:05:19,090 --> 00:05:21,550 This may the only place on my book tour 116 00:05:21,550 --> 00:05:23,530 where somebody will know what this actually is. 117 00:05:23,530 --> 00:05:26,374 Is there anybody who recognizes this picture? 118 00:05:26,374 --> 00:05:27,290 AUDIENCE: Your office? 119 00:05:27,290 --> 00:05:27,998 JOHN PALFREY: No. 120 00:05:27,998 --> 00:05:30,128 It comes from-- yes, [INAUDIBLE]? 121 00:05:30,128 --> 00:05:31,880 AUDIENCE: Oliver Wendell Holmes' library? 122 00:05:31,880 --> 00:05:33,338 JOHN PALFREY: Yes, that's so great. 123 00:05:33,338 --> 00:05:34,880 This is the first time someone has 124 00:05:34,880 --> 00:05:36,390 known the answer to that question, 125 00:05:36,390 --> 00:05:37,910 and I ask it everywhere. 126 00:05:37,910 --> 00:05:41,780 This is the personal library of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who 127 00:05:41,780 --> 00:05:43,960 of course was a professor here. 128 00:05:43,960 --> 00:05:46,880 But this was actually his home in Washington, DC. 129 00:05:46,880 --> 00:05:49,600 And I love this picture for a whole bunch of reasons. 130 00:05:49,600 --> 00:05:52,250 It reminds me of the Harvard Law School Library and the awesome 131 00:05:52,250 --> 00:05:54,290 librarians and archivists who work in it, 132 00:05:54,290 --> 00:05:56,930 and the fact that they digitized this amazing collection 133 00:05:56,930 --> 00:05:58,200 of Oliver Wendell Holmes'. 134 00:05:58,200 --> 00:06:01,620 But it also to me is a great challenge to all of us 135 00:06:01,620 --> 00:06:03,620 when we think about libraries and the libraries 136 00:06:03,620 --> 00:06:04,203 of the future. 137 00:06:04,203 --> 00:06:07,410 And the reason I see it as a challenge is this room to me 138 00:06:07,410 --> 00:06:10,080 is really, really appealing-- the idea 139 00:06:10,080 --> 00:06:12,520 that you could have a space in your home 140 00:06:12,520 --> 00:06:15,630 that is surrounded by books in this way and sit in that chair 141 00:06:15,630 --> 00:06:17,450 and think of all the great opinions 142 00:06:17,450 --> 00:06:18,464 that Holmes thought up. 143 00:06:18,464 --> 00:06:19,880 Now, we know he had a few clangers 144 00:06:19,880 --> 00:06:21,280 and so forth, so he thought up some bad ones. 145 00:06:21,280 --> 00:06:22,970 And maybe he didn't do it here. 146 00:06:22,970 --> 00:06:26,710 But just the idea that he was inspired by sitting there. 147 00:06:26,710 --> 00:06:28,910 And for many of us, we work with young people. 148 00:06:28,910 --> 00:06:32,690 I now live with and work with about 1,100 teenagers, 149 00:06:32,690 --> 00:06:35,090 and I think a ton about what inspires them. 150 00:06:35,090 --> 00:06:36,940 What kind of space would inspire them? 151 00:06:36,940 --> 00:06:39,000 What kind of a library space would? 152 00:06:39,000 --> 00:06:41,050 And for most of our teenagers, my guess 153 00:06:41,050 --> 00:06:43,870 is that this might be a cool and inspiring space, 154 00:06:43,870 --> 00:06:46,090 but for almost none of them would they sit up, 155 00:06:46,090 --> 00:06:48,830 swirl around that chair, and then pull one of those 156 00:06:48,830 --> 00:06:49,794 off the shelf. 157 00:06:49,794 --> 00:06:52,460 For those of us who've worked in the Harvard Law School Library, 158 00:06:52,460 --> 00:06:54,990 I was always struck by the fact that we were almost always 159 00:06:54,990 --> 00:06:56,190 full as a library. 160 00:06:56,190 --> 00:06:58,340 Cheek by jowl those kids were there. 161 00:06:58,340 --> 00:07:00,190 Very often they had those approved 162 00:07:00,190 --> 00:07:01,709 Harvard Law School Library mugs. 163 00:07:01,709 --> 00:07:03,000 And they had a casebook, right? 164 00:07:03,000 --> 00:07:05,070 And they were highlighting away on the casebook, 165 00:07:05,070 --> 00:07:07,590 but they weren't doing a ton of pulling statutes 166 00:07:07,590 --> 00:07:09,650 or other things off the shelves-- almost 167 00:07:09,650 --> 00:07:12,170 never, at least in the big reading room, literally never. 168 00:07:12,170 --> 00:07:14,000 And maybe if they had a great reference librarian 169 00:07:14,000 --> 00:07:15,040 they might have found something. 170 00:07:15,040 --> 00:07:17,170 But by and large, they were there for other reasons. 171 00:07:17,170 --> 00:07:17,670 Right? 172 00:07:17,670 --> 00:07:19,801 They are there probably right now studying away 173 00:07:19,801 --> 00:07:20,550 for other reasons. 174 00:07:20,550 --> 00:07:23,236 And I think our challenge, in a way, in a digital era 175 00:07:23,236 --> 00:07:24,610 is to come up with something that 176 00:07:24,610 --> 00:07:27,890 is as powerful and appealing a space for kids 177 00:07:27,890 --> 00:07:31,221 as a learning space and as an environment in libraries. 178 00:07:31,221 --> 00:07:33,470 And I think that's the challenge back on all of us who 179 00:07:33,470 --> 00:07:35,655 are trying to design and to create these spaces 180 00:07:35,655 --> 00:07:37,000 in an exciting way. 181 00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:40,120 And I think we do this against a backdrop where libraries 182 00:07:40,120 --> 00:07:42,110 are to some extent in peril. 183 00:07:42,110 --> 00:07:44,430 Now, I stand in a room, I realize, at Harvard, 184 00:07:44,430 --> 00:07:47,780 the place where unbelievable support for libraries exists. 185 00:07:47,780 --> 00:07:49,887 But even within Harvard, we know that there 186 00:07:49,887 --> 00:07:51,720 are different schools that support libraries 187 00:07:51,720 --> 00:07:52,920 at different levels. 188 00:07:52,920 --> 00:07:53,700 Our dean is here. 189 00:07:53,700 --> 00:07:54,450 Meet Dean Minow. 190 00:07:54,450 --> 00:07:55,600 Thank you for being here. 191 00:07:55,600 --> 00:07:58,901 Thank you for being a lover of libraries, not just evidenced 192 00:07:58,901 --> 00:08:01,150 by the fact that you're here but because of all you do 193 00:08:01,150 --> 00:08:03,020 to make libraries great here. 194 00:08:03,020 --> 00:08:04,830 But even within the context of Harvard, 195 00:08:04,830 --> 00:08:06,710 we went through several year period 196 00:08:06,710 --> 00:08:07,940 of quite a bit of transition. 197 00:08:07,940 --> 00:08:09,430 And I was a part of that too. 198 00:08:09,430 --> 00:08:11,880 And we know that there are times when libraries are 199 00:08:11,880 --> 00:08:13,380 under a great deal of pressure. 200 00:08:13,380 --> 00:08:14,840 That is true in academic settings, 201 00:08:14,840 --> 00:08:19,325 and obviously this is a difficult context for many. 202 00:08:19,325 --> 00:08:21,700 But it's particularly true, I think, in public libraries. 203 00:08:21,700 --> 00:08:23,875 And as I've traveled around in school libraries-- 204 00:08:23,875 --> 00:08:26,610 the 100,000 or so school libraries around the country-- 205 00:08:26,610 --> 00:08:28,300 very often people have a funny view 206 00:08:28,300 --> 00:08:30,540 that libraries aren't maybe as useful as they once 207 00:08:30,540 --> 00:08:32,090 were, which I think is exactly wrong, 208 00:08:32,090 --> 00:08:33,600 which is why I wrote this book. 209 00:08:33,600 --> 00:08:35,607 This is a quote from an Amazon review 210 00:08:35,607 --> 00:08:36,690 by somebody I do not know. 211 00:08:36,690 --> 00:08:37,815 His name is David Weinberg. 212 00:08:37,815 --> 00:08:39,919 It is not David Weinberger our friend. 213 00:08:39,919 --> 00:08:42,710 But this was a not particularly flattering review 214 00:08:42,710 --> 00:08:46,372 on Amazon of my book, and it was disagreeing basically 215 00:08:46,372 --> 00:08:48,080 with the premise of the importance of it. 216 00:08:48,080 --> 00:08:50,570 But I thought it was a particularly good view that 217 00:08:50,570 --> 00:08:53,410 sums up what some people think, and it 218 00:08:53,410 --> 00:08:55,240 is a prevailing view out there. 219 00:08:55,240 --> 00:08:58,110 I realized often also when I was reading the book 220 00:08:58,110 --> 00:09:00,950 that one of the most common conversations that I had 221 00:09:00,950 --> 00:09:03,930 after becoming the Director of the Harvard Law School Library 222 00:09:03,930 --> 00:09:06,080 was one at a backyard barbecue or a cocktail 223 00:09:06,080 --> 00:09:08,050 party, and someone would come up to me and say, 224 00:09:08,050 --> 00:09:08,966 so what are you up to? 225 00:09:08,966 --> 00:09:10,750 And I would say, I'm just becoming 226 00:09:10,750 --> 00:09:12,000 the director of this library. 227 00:09:12,000 --> 00:09:14,830 And then two seconds later the person would interrupt me 228 00:09:14,830 --> 00:09:16,520 and say, oh, wait a minute, libraries 229 00:09:16,520 --> 00:09:17,210 aren't as useful anymore. 230 00:09:17,210 --> 00:09:18,186 You're the digital guy. 231 00:09:18,186 --> 00:09:19,310 You're getting rid of them. 232 00:09:19,310 --> 00:09:20,400 You're getting rid of all the books. 233 00:09:20,400 --> 00:09:21,640 And then they'd have walked away. 234 00:09:21,640 --> 00:09:23,780 In this sense, I never had the chance to kind of grab them 235 00:09:23,780 --> 00:09:26,160 and say, no, no, no, libraries are more important than ever 236 00:09:26,160 --> 00:09:27,160 and here's what we have to do. 237 00:09:27,160 --> 00:09:28,530 And so that's why I wrote the book in a way, 238 00:09:28,530 --> 00:09:30,696 was to answer that question for all those people who 239 00:09:30,696 --> 00:09:34,037 walked away from me at parties. 240 00:09:34,037 --> 00:09:36,120 They're not probably going to be reading the book. 241 00:09:36,120 --> 00:09:37,430 I get the irony of that. 242 00:09:37,430 --> 00:09:41,005 But I still felt I had to win the argument. 243 00:09:41,005 --> 00:09:43,020 But I say it in a serious tone, which 244 00:09:43,020 --> 00:09:45,940 is we recognize that in many communities, when 245 00:09:45,940 --> 00:09:48,540 there is a choice between money for police and fire 246 00:09:48,540 --> 00:09:50,360 and education and other important things-- 247 00:09:50,360 --> 00:09:52,390 and this is true in my hometown now of Andover, 248 00:09:52,390 --> 00:09:54,410 too-- the library doesn't get as much support. 249 00:09:54,410 --> 00:09:57,290 The support is eroding for libraries in these communities, 250 00:09:57,290 --> 00:10:00,570 and I think we need to reverse that polarity. 251 00:10:00,570 --> 00:10:03,710 We do this also, though, I think, in the context, at least 252 00:10:03,710 --> 00:10:06,440 in the United States, of an amazing culture 253 00:10:06,440 --> 00:10:08,710 of support for libraries and a history of support 254 00:10:08,710 --> 00:10:09,750 for libraries. 255 00:10:09,750 --> 00:10:12,370 This image comes from our hometown of Boston right 256 00:10:12,370 --> 00:10:13,620 across the river. 257 00:10:13,620 --> 00:10:15,510 Every time I see this I get chills 258 00:10:15,510 --> 00:10:17,960 down my spine, the idea of free to all; 259 00:10:17,960 --> 00:10:21,620 the idea that the big municipal public libraries started right 260 00:10:21,620 --> 00:10:24,870 here about 150 years ago, and with an incredibly 261 00:10:24,870 --> 00:10:28,810 simple democratic premise-- the basic idea that information 262 00:10:28,810 --> 00:10:31,950 should be free, knowledge should be free, to anyone, regardless 263 00:10:31,950 --> 00:10:33,230 of their ability to pay. 264 00:10:33,230 --> 00:10:36,860 And this was something that is in the cradle of the Athens 265 00:10:36,860 --> 00:10:39,530 that we created here in Boston, the middle of our city 266 00:10:39,530 --> 00:10:40,400 in Copley Square. 267 00:10:40,400 --> 00:10:42,670 And so we have a history of making 268 00:10:42,670 --> 00:10:45,160 this kind of amazing support for our communities, 269 00:10:45,160 --> 00:10:46,430 for our democracies. 270 00:10:46,430 --> 00:10:48,760 And part of what I worry about in this moment of peril 271 00:10:48,760 --> 00:10:51,430 for libraries is that we will lose sight of that, 272 00:10:51,430 --> 00:10:53,910 and that oddly, we actually might backtrack. 273 00:10:53,910 --> 00:10:56,920 We might actually have less access in our democracy 274 00:10:56,920 --> 00:10:59,516 to information in the digital age than in an analog age. 275 00:10:59,516 --> 00:11:00,640 And that would be terrible. 276 00:11:00,640 --> 00:11:03,060 That would be, I think, perverse. 277 00:11:03,060 --> 00:11:05,620 I think that's true for a variety of reasons. 278 00:11:05,620 --> 00:11:07,710 And a simplistic version of that argument 279 00:11:07,710 --> 00:11:10,850 is to say, increasingly, as knowledge moves to the cloud, 280 00:11:10,850 --> 00:11:13,680 one could imagine it being vastly more available, 281 00:11:13,680 --> 00:11:15,600 that anybody with one of these devices 282 00:11:15,600 --> 00:11:17,740 could get access to whatever they wanted. 283 00:11:17,740 --> 00:11:19,448 But there are a couple reasons why that's 284 00:11:19,448 --> 00:11:21,250 not so simple or so true. 285 00:11:21,250 --> 00:11:25,050 One is if you look at the owners of the cloud in essence, 286 00:11:25,050 --> 00:11:26,470 they're almost all private firms. 287 00:11:26,470 --> 00:11:29,840 They're almost all parties that are private companies and doing 288 00:11:29,840 --> 00:11:31,790 it for profit-- which is not a bad thing, 289 00:11:31,790 --> 00:11:34,630 and this is not an anti-corporate screed so much 290 00:11:34,630 --> 00:11:37,746 as to say public spaces in cyberspace 291 00:11:37,746 --> 00:11:39,370 have been things that we've had to win. 292 00:11:39,370 --> 00:11:41,953 It's what Jonathan Zittrain and Yochai Benkler and the Berkman 293 00:11:41,953 --> 00:11:46,080 Center have had to create and really care for and establish. 294 00:11:46,080 --> 00:11:48,430 As we hurtle to a cloud-based environment, 295 00:11:48,430 --> 00:11:51,360 by and large we turn to private players like Amazon and others 296 00:11:51,360 --> 00:11:52,300 to store our stuff. 297 00:11:52,300 --> 00:11:56,050 So in a very simple mode, if we increasingly 298 00:11:56,050 --> 00:11:58,740 create our materials and put them in private hands 299 00:11:58,740 --> 00:12:01,650 as opposed to, say, in the public hands-- or roughly 300 00:12:01,650 --> 00:12:04,130 speaking, public-spirited hands of libraries 301 00:12:04,130 --> 00:12:08,320 and the research universities that have libraries-- 302 00:12:08,320 --> 00:12:10,815 I think that is a dangerous thing. 303 00:12:10,815 --> 00:12:12,900 There are many other ways in which it's tricky, 304 00:12:12,900 --> 00:12:14,108 and we can come back to that. 305 00:12:14,108 --> 00:12:15,880 But I think it is something worth worrying 306 00:12:15,880 --> 00:12:17,290 about a little bit. 307 00:12:17,290 --> 00:12:19,760 There's a way to make this a bit more precise, 308 00:12:19,760 --> 00:12:22,140 which is for those who've worked in libraries, 309 00:12:22,140 --> 00:12:25,320 you know that it's not always possible for libraries 310 00:12:25,320 --> 00:12:27,780 to do exactly in the digital age what they've 311 00:12:27,780 --> 00:12:29,250 done in the physical age. 312 00:12:29,250 --> 00:12:32,340 One of the ways in which this is true is the lending of ebooks. 313 00:12:32,340 --> 00:12:34,450 So by and large, publishers have made 314 00:12:34,450 --> 00:12:37,060 it tricky to lend ebooks on the same terms 315 00:12:37,060 --> 00:12:39,110 that you could lend a physical book. 316 00:12:39,110 --> 00:12:40,660 This is where it is relevant that we 317 00:12:40,660 --> 00:12:43,770 are at a school, of course, because in fact they're treated 318 00:12:43,770 --> 00:12:45,190 in two really different ways. 319 00:12:45,190 --> 00:12:47,857 The background law for lending stuff like this 320 00:12:47,857 --> 00:12:49,190 is actually really, really good. 321 00:12:49,190 --> 00:12:52,230 The background copyright, in a simple sense, is positive. 322 00:12:52,230 --> 00:12:54,190 Which is, libraries for hundreds of years 323 00:12:54,190 --> 00:12:56,000 have been able to buy something like this 324 00:12:56,000 --> 00:12:57,496 and then do more or less whatever 325 00:12:57,496 --> 00:12:58,620 they wanted with it, right? 326 00:12:58,620 --> 00:13:00,453 You could bring it to a secondhand book shop 327 00:13:00,453 --> 00:13:02,510 and sell it, or you could lend it as many times 328 00:13:02,510 --> 00:13:04,051 as you wanted or you could tear it up 329 00:13:04,051 --> 00:13:06,480 or you could digitize it and do lots of things. 330 00:13:06,480 --> 00:13:08,700 But it turns out that if you get that same book 331 00:13:08,700 --> 00:13:10,740 and you put it on one of these devices 332 00:13:10,740 --> 00:13:14,890 and a library is wishing to get it on terms that it can license 333 00:13:14,890 --> 00:13:17,050 to someone else, all of a sudden it is governed not 334 00:13:17,050 --> 00:13:19,424 by the background copyright law so much as it is governed 335 00:13:19,424 --> 00:13:22,020 by the contract law that the company sets up, 336 00:13:22,020 --> 00:13:23,880 the publisher sets up with the library. 337 00:13:23,880 --> 00:13:25,754 And for all those who've worked in libraries, 338 00:13:25,754 --> 00:13:28,870 you know that you can't always get e-books on as good terms 339 00:13:28,870 --> 00:13:30,220 as you can get physical books. 340 00:13:30,220 --> 00:13:32,920 And some of the outcomes are perverse and bizarre, 341 00:13:32,920 --> 00:13:34,720 like you can't read it aloud. 342 00:13:34,720 --> 00:13:36,970 Those are some of the worst of the terms. 343 00:13:36,970 --> 00:13:40,000 Some of the other terms have been the 26-lend rule. 344 00:13:40,000 --> 00:13:41,730 Does anybody remember that great offering 345 00:13:41,730 --> 00:13:43,330 from a publisher, the notion that you 346 00:13:43,330 --> 00:13:47,090 could get one of these for whatever the full price was 347 00:13:47,090 --> 00:13:49,482 and Jonathan and I could lend it back and forth 26 times, 348 00:13:49,482 --> 00:13:50,940 and then of course it would go away 349 00:13:50,940 --> 00:13:52,600 because it would have worn out. 350 00:13:52,600 --> 00:13:53,590 Right? 351 00:13:53,590 --> 00:13:56,340 That premise didn't work out all that well. 352 00:13:56,340 --> 00:13:58,140 The basic idea, though, is that it has not 353 00:13:58,140 --> 00:14:01,550 been possible for libraries to get digital materials on as 354 00:14:01,550 --> 00:14:04,130 good a deal, or in fact, as often, 355 00:14:04,130 --> 00:14:06,670 as they could get it in physical form. 356 00:14:06,670 --> 00:14:09,820 And this, I think, is a dangerous premise. 357 00:14:09,820 --> 00:14:11,720 It's also the case that when it is 358 00:14:11,720 --> 00:14:16,370 a contract between the company and the library, 359 00:14:16,370 --> 00:14:18,780 there's also something tricky behind it with respect 360 00:14:18,780 --> 00:14:21,200 to the ability to store it over a long period of time too. 361 00:14:21,200 --> 00:14:23,300 So if the point is we're paying it 362 00:14:23,300 --> 00:14:26,080 as though we were leasing for it, when we stop paying for it, 363 00:14:26,080 --> 00:14:26,946 it could go away. 364 00:14:26,946 --> 00:14:28,570 So in fact, libraries might in fact not 365 00:14:28,570 --> 00:14:31,430 have collections if we were only turning from owners 366 00:14:31,430 --> 00:14:33,020 of the information and the knowledge 367 00:14:33,020 --> 00:14:35,232 into those who are leasing it, or renters. 368 00:14:35,232 --> 00:14:36,690 And many people have worked on this 369 00:14:36,690 --> 00:14:38,190 from many different angles. 370 00:14:38,190 --> 00:14:40,970 Here, I would say, in the cradle of the open access movement. 371 00:14:40,970 --> 00:14:44,000 That is one great answer to it, where at the FAS 372 00:14:44,000 --> 00:14:46,477 level and Bob Darnton and others led the effort there, 373 00:14:46,477 --> 00:14:48,060 and at Harvard Law School, where we've 374 00:14:48,060 --> 00:14:50,555 committed to putting our materials in the commons 375 00:14:50,555 --> 00:14:51,740 in an open access way. 376 00:14:51,740 --> 00:14:53,230 That's not such a big deal. 377 00:14:53,230 --> 00:14:56,810 But for the vast majority of what is created and published, 378 00:14:56,810 --> 00:14:59,390 we actually have potentially a less good arrangement 379 00:14:59,390 --> 00:15:02,970 going forward if we don't change the deal that is being 380 00:15:02,970 --> 00:15:05,260 offered for digital materials. 381 00:15:05,260 --> 00:15:08,020 Just out of curiosity, if you were reading something, 382 00:15:08,020 --> 00:15:12,410 how many people still prefer this, a hard-copy kind of book? 383 00:15:12,410 --> 00:15:13,400 Vast majority. 384 00:15:13,400 --> 00:15:16,780 How many people prefer an ebook? 385 00:15:16,780 --> 00:15:17,700 Relatively few. 386 00:15:17,700 --> 00:15:19,660 And how many people are more or less agnostic, 387 00:15:19,660 --> 00:15:21,750 you kind of do both? 388 00:15:21,750 --> 00:15:22,550 Interesting. 389 00:15:22,550 --> 00:15:24,666 I think that may be the growing group actually, 390 00:15:24,666 --> 00:15:26,290 is those who want to read this at night 391 00:15:26,290 --> 00:15:27,373 but carry this on a plane. 392 00:15:27,373 --> 00:15:29,445 I think that's kind of the growth of it. 393 00:15:29,445 --> 00:15:31,570 Oh, Stuart Schieber, also the open access champion. 394 00:15:31,570 --> 00:15:33,460 I'm sorry, I didn't you see you there before. 395 00:15:33,460 --> 00:15:35,430 Congratulations and thank you. 396 00:15:35,430 --> 00:15:37,690 But the basic point being that we 397 00:15:37,690 --> 00:15:39,320 need to ensure that in a digital age 398 00:15:39,320 --> 00:15:42,250 there is just as much access from a democratic perspective 399 00:15:42,250 --> 00:15:45,050 as there's been, if not more so. 400 00:15:45,050 --> 00:15:47,959 So this picture shows a moment in time 401 00:15:47,959 --> 00:15:50,000 when we were actually building that Boston Public 402 00:15:50,000 --> 00:15:52,580 Library, when we were putting up this amazing edifice 403 00:15:52,580 --> 00:15:54,020 in the middle of Copley Square. 404 00:15:54,020 --> 00:15:56,240 It was a few decades after the library started. 405 00:15:56,240 --> 00:15:58,070 It was 1890. 406 00:15:58,070 --> 00:15:59,900 And the reason I love this picture is 407 00:15:59,900 --> 00:16:02,260 because I think that's, roughly speaking, the moment 408 00:16:02,260 --> 00:16:03,550 we find ourselves in now. 409 00:16:03,550 --> 00:16:06,480 We have a moment where we are building for the future 410 00:16:06,480 --> 00:16:08,316 the next set of libraries. 411 00:16:08,316 --> 00:16:09,690 And it is a set of libraries that 412 00:16:09,690 --> 00:16:12,730 will exist both in digital form and in physical form. 413 00:16:12,730 --> 00:16:15,390 And I think we actually ought to be thinking about this 414 00:16:15,390 --> 00:16:17,130 in architectural form. 415 00:16:17,130 --> 00:16:19,610 So does anybody recognize this one? 416 00:16:19,610 --> 00:16:22,280 A lot of people work in this building. 417 00:16:22,280 --> 00:16:25,410 This is a side elevation of Langdell Hall. 418 00:16:25,410 --> 00:16:29,510 And it is to my mind the moment that we're in right now, 419 00:16:29,510 --> 00:16:31,382 which is where we are convening together, 420 00:16:31,382 --> 00:16:33,590 I think-- or ought to be convening-- those people who 421 00:16:33,590 --> 00:16:36,600 think about information architecture and the importance 422 00:16:36,600 --> 00:16:39,040 of the digital era and how we actually 423 00:16:39,040 --> 00:16:40,870 frame and make accessible information 424 00:16:40,870 --> 00:16:42,940 with the analog era. 425 00:16:42,940 --> 00:16:45,700 I think that future will be a hybrid of libraries 426 00:16:45,700 --> 00:16:48,190 that are very much physical spaces, but also which 427 00:16:48,190 --> 00:16:50,890 connect to the cyberspace that we are creating. 428 00:16:50,890 --> 00:16:53,340 And I think in order to do that well, what we need to do 429 00:16:53,340 --> 00:16:55,684 is actually convene all of these people together 430 00:16:55,684 --> 00:16:58,100 and actually work in a way that is much more collaborative 431 00:16:58,100 --> 00:17:00,305 than we've done in the past. 432 00:17:00,305 --> 00:17:02,305 One of the ways in which we've been doing that-- 433 00:17:02,305 --> 00:17:05,860 and many people in this room are to thank for that; 434 00:17:05,860 --> 00:17:10,329 Bob Darnton called together a group of 40 people at Radcliffe 435 00:17:10,329 --> 00:17:13,960 Institute a few years ago to convene an effort really 436 00:17:13,960 --> 00:17:17,109 to say, can we in fact come up with the design 437 00:17:17,109 --> 00:17:21,099 for a combined public and private effort 438 00:17:21,099 --> 00:17:24,130 to create a combined hybrid digital 439 00:17:24,130 --> 00:17:25,630 and physical infrastructure? 440 00:17:25,630 --> 00:17:28,440 That has become the idea behind the Digital Public 441 00:17:28,440 --> 00:17:29,770 Library of America. 442 00:17:29,770 --> 00:17:32,890 40 people in that room actually agreed to this sentence, 443 00:17:32,890 --> 00:17:34,580 "To create an open distributed network 444 00:17:34,580 --> 00:17:36,930 of comprehensive online resources." 445 00:17:36,930 --> 00:17:39,130 And that's sort of a crazy ambitious thing 446 00:17:39,130 --> 00:17:42,272 that nobody thought in fact could work, but somehow it has. 447 00:17:42,272 --> 00:17:43,730 And Rebecca Haycock and many people 448 00:17:43,730 --> 00:17:45,270 here have made it come together. 449 00:17:45,270 --> 00:17:47,150 I think it's one example of what we 450 00:17:47,150 --> 00:17:50,440 can do to solve this problem. 451 00:17:50,440 --> 00:17:52,640 OK, so pause there for a second and say, 452 00:17:52,640 --> 00:17:55,690 what are the elements of a library in a digital age 453 00:17:55,690 --> 00:17:58,750 that the Digital Public Library of America and other things 454 00:17:58,750 --> 00:18:01,100 might be able to bring about? 455 00:18:01,100 --> 00:18:04,430 I think fundamentally, libraries remain about people. 456 00:18:04,430 --> 00:18:07,600 So I think that the crucial aspect of libraries 457 00:18:07,600 --> 00:18:11,890 is keeping the humanity in the transaction 458 00:18:11,890 --> 00:18:14,540 between people and information, people and knowledge. 459 00:18:14,540 --> 00:18:17,219 I think one of the challenges that people often throw out 460 00:18:17,219 --> 00:18:19,760 about libraries is we don't need them so much, because people 461 00:18:19,760 --> 00:18:23,250 can help themselves so easily through these kinds of devices. 462 00:18:23,250 --> 00:18:25,330 One example of this that struck me 463 00:18:25,330 --> 00:18:28,320 as I was writing a book about the importance of librarians 464 00:18:28,320 --> 00:18:31,030 happened in a small-town library in Andover, Mass. 465 00:18:31,030 --> 00:18:33,332 I was editing one chapter and it was about 3:00 466 00:18:33,332 --> 00:18:34,040 in the afternoon. 467 00:18:34,040 --> 00:18:36,384 A whole pile of kids came in after school, which 468 00:18:36,384 --> 00:18:37,550 is a fun thing that happens. 469 00:18:37,550 --> 00:18:40,065 Libraries fill up with students who are spilling out 470 00:18:40,065 --> 00:18:41,640 of schools when they close. 471 00:18:41,640 --> 00:18:44,182 And the kids all went into the teen section, and some of them 472 00:18:44,182 --> 00:18:46,598 were doing their homework and others were gaming and doing 473 00:18:46,598 --> 00:18:47,300 other things. 474 00:18:47,300 --> 00:18:50,090 And one of them was trying to do a science thing. 475 00:18:50,090 --> 00:18:52,540 And the kid turned to his iPhone he said, 476 00:18:52,540 --> 00:18:55,010 Siri, what does terminal velocity mean? 477 00:18:55,010 --> 00:18:56,690 This was in the middle of a library. 478 00:18:56,690 --> 00:18:58,690 And Siri, it turned out, did not know 479 00:18:58,690 --> 00:19:00,096 what terminal velocity meant. 480 00:19:00,096 --> 00:19:00,810 [LAUGHTER] 481 00:19:00,810 --> 00:19:03,430 But like three feet away was an amazing librarian. 482 00:19:03,430 --> 00:19:06,730 And I was sure that that woman could have either told him 483 00:19:06,730 --> 00:19:09,489 exactly what terminal velocity meant or at least shown him-- 484 00:19:09,489 --> 00:19:11,030 probably better-- the way to find out 485 00:19:11,030 --> 00:19:12,660 about terminal velocity. 486 00:19:12,660 --> 00:19:15,070 You see these examples over and over again, 487 00:19:15,070 --> 00:19:16,570 but I think it is important to note. 488 00:19:16,570 --> 00:19:19,080 And this is one of the aspects of this book that 489 00:19:19,080 --> 00:19:20,280 is a little challenging. 490 00:19:20,280 --> 00:19:22,040 There is a tough-love story here, 491 00:19:22,040 --> 00:19:23,780 which is when we study young people 492 00:19:23,780 --> 00:19:25,530 and how they look for information, 493 00:19:25,530 --> 00:19:27,420 librarians are pretty low on that list. 494 00:19:27,420 --> 00:19:29,400 The project information literacy studies 495 00:19:29,400 --> 00:19:31,820 are probably the clearest in that zone, 496 00:19:31,820 --> 00:19:34,276 that kids often do look to Google and Wikipedia. 497 00:19:34,276 --> 00:19:35,650 They often look to their teachers 498 00:19:35,650 --> 00:19:37,074 in that particular class. 499 00:19:37,074 --> 00:19:38,740 But we have to do a better job, I think, 500 00:19:38,740 --> 00:19:41,180 as librarians and people who work in libraries, to ensure 501 00:19:41,180 --> 00:19:43,370 that kids actually do go and use these resources 502 00:19:43,370 --> 00:19:44,900 and know to do that, and we actually 503 00:19:44,900 --> 00:19:47,500 have to prompt them to do it and to teach them to do it. 504 00:19:47,500 --> 00:19:49,700 But I start with the humanity as a key element 505 00:19:49,700 --> 00:19:52,490 of libraries in a digital age. 506 00:19:52,490 --> 00:19:55,020 Second, I think libraries have to shift 507 00:19:55,020 --> 00:19:58,530 from being standalone silos-- which I think there have been 508 00:19:58,530 --> 00:20:01,140 lots of reasons for them to be-- to being platforms 509 00:20:01,140 --> 00:20:03,160 and to being connected entities. 510 00:20:03,160 --> 00:20:05,030 So this, I think, invokes a lot of the work 511 00:20:05,030 --> 00:20:06,960 that Yochai has done in the wealth of networks 512 00:20:06,960 --> 00:20:07,607 and otherwise. 513 00:20:07,607 --> 00:20:09,440 If you think about the history of libraries, 514 00:20:09,440 --> 00:20:11,660 go back thousands of years to the library 515 00:20:11,660 --> 00:20:13,160 at the Palace of Ebla, for instance, 516 00:20:13,160 --> 00:20:16,170 in modern day Syria, or the Library of Alexandria-- 517 00:20:16,170 --> 00:20:17,695 the idea behind the library in a way 518 00:20:17,695 --> 00:20:19,150 was you brought all that material. 519 00:20:19,150 --> 00:20:20,733 Whatever you could get, you brought it 520 00:20:20,733 --> 00:20:21,710 to a particular place. 521 00:20:21,710 --> 00:20:23,460 And now you may think about it as bringing 522 00:20:23,460 --> 00:20:25,500 to a particular school, a particular zip code, 523 00:20:25,500 --> 00:20:26,760 all of those materials. 524 00:20:26,760 --> 00:20:29,215 And that was understandable as a previous iteration 525 00:20:29,215 --> 00:20:30,450 of libraries. 526 00:20:30,450 --> 00:20:33,890 I still think to some extent we do that, and too often 527 00:20:33,890 --> 00:20:36,655 I sometimes hear of schools bragging about how many volumes 528 00:20:36,655 --> 00:20:38,780 they have or how much they spend on their libraries 529 00:20:38,780 --> 00:20:40,660 in order to attract kids or people. 530 00:20:40,660 --> 00:20:42,230 I think that misses the point. 531 00:20:42,230 --> 00:20:45,080 I think it misses the point that by working much more 532 00:20:45,080 --> 00:20:47,200 together and actually by seeing libraries 533 00:20:47,200 --> 00:20:49,010 as a connected series of platforms, 534 00:20:49,010 --> 00:20:52,590 as part of the network, they can accomplish much more. 535 00:20:52,590 --> 00:20:54,760 This particular design of a platform 536 00:20:54,760 --> 00:20:57,950 is the DPLA's rough structure, the Digital Public 537 00:20:57,950 --> 00:20:59,400 Library of America. 538 00:20:59,400 --> 00:21:01,420 And the key to it, in a way, is the fact 539 00:21:01,420 --> 00:21:04,140 that it is just a whole pile of open source 540 00:21:04,140 --> 00:21:08,280 code with a whole pile of open metadata and as much open 541 00:21:08,280 --> 00:21:10,040 access material as you possibly can have, 542 00:21:10,040 --> 00:21:11,520 and a bunch of different parties. 543 00:21:11,520 --> 00:21:13,230 In this case, service hubs are states 544 00:21:13,230 --> 00:21:16,075 by and large, Content hubs are things like Harvard University. 545 00:21:16,075 --> 00:21:17,700 Thank you, [? Sara ?] Thomas and others 546 00:21:17,700 --> 00:21:20,110 for contributing material in. 547 00:21:20,110 --> 00:21:23,940 And the ability to export on a bulk basis for anybody who 548 00:21:23,940 --> 00:21:25,350 wishes to do it. 549 00:21:25,350 --> 00:21:28,490 And as you see from the top, the notion that nobody 550 00:21:28,490 --> 00:21:30,090 has yet figured out the right way 551 00:21:30,090 --> 00:21:33,250 to present library material in a digital age. 552 00:21:33,250 --> 00:21:34,740 And the point is that we can have 553 00:21:34,740 --> 00:21:36,250 lots of potential frontends. 554 00:21:36,250 --> 00:21:38,650 We can have lots of different applications and ways 555 00:21:38,650 --> 00:21:41,770 to share our materials, especially if we think of them 556 00:21:41,770 --> 00:21:44,070 as platforms, pool the materials together, 557 00:21:44,070 --> 00:21:49,950 and make it possible through an open API, an ability 558 00:21:49,950 --> 00:21:53,810 to create any front-end that you would like. 559 00:21:53,810 --> 00:21:57,480 So today there is one way to get it, which is dp.la. 560 00:21:57,480 --> 00:22:00,370 You could go on your mobile device or your computer, 561 00:22:00,370 --> 00:22:02,840 and you can find a search engine and a way 562 00:22:02,840 --> 00:22:04,320 into all of these materials. 563 00:22:04,320 --> 00:22:06,010 But likewise, if you go back a screen, 564 00:22:06,010 --> 00:22:08,520 that's just this particular front-end. 565 00:22:08,520 --> 00:22:10,950 I think the ultimate success of the project 566 00:22:10,950 --> 00:22:14,040 is that any library could create on this open API 567 00:22:14,040 --> 00:22:17,280 the ability to find a better way to do this presentation, 568 00:22:17,280 --> 00:22:19,410 to find a way to present this material. 569 00:22:19,410 --> 00:22:22,370 And any library could create an application or a front-end that 570 00:22:22,370 --> 00:22:24,670 would in fact make it so that nobody even 571 00:22:24,670 --> 00:22:26,580 knew that the DPLA was there. 572 00:22:26,580 --> 00:22:30,140 The DPLA could be, ultimately, entirely plumbing, 573 00:22:30,140 --> 00:22:32,980 and the success be in the way in which different communities 574 00:22:32,980 --> 00:22:34,569 have presented this material. 575 00:22:34,569 --> 00:22:36,860 That's a very different way of thinking about libraries 576 00:22:36,860 --> 00:22:39,850 as institutions, but it's about taking advantage 577 00:22:39,850 --> 00:22:41,890 of what the miracles of the web have 578 00:22:41,890 --> 00:22:43,550 made possible and that magic. 579 00:22:43,550 --> 00:22:46,300 And that, I think, requires us to be a little bit less 580 00:22:46,300 --> 00:22:48,680 egocentric as institutions and much more 581 00:22:48,680 --> 00:22:51,390 seeing it as a way to share. 582 00:22:51,390 --> 00:22:56,010 As of right now, just a small plug for where the DPLA is. 583 00:22:56,010 --> 00:22:59,860 We have filled up about a third of the map in terms of places 584 00:22:59,860 --> 00:23:02,350 contributing materials into this Digital Public 585 00:23:02,350 --> 00:23:04,110 Library of America. 586 00:23:04,110 --> 00:23:07,800 The red states-- I suppose that's maybe 587 00:23:07,800 --> 00:23:10,310 not the colors we should have used for this in this room-- 588 00:23:10,310 --> 00:23:12,820 are the ones that do have up and running-- actually it's 589 00:23:12,820 --> 00:23:16,190 perfect, Harvard colors, in that way-- have service hubs. 590 00:23:16,190 --> 00:23:17,700 So if you look at Massachusetts, we 591 00:23:17,700 --> 00:23:19,337 have the Digital Commonwealth. 592 00:23:19,337 --> 00:23:21,670 And if you think about what the Digital Commonwealth is, 593 00:23:21,670 --> 00:23:24,640 it's a fabulous example for what the rest of the country 594 00:23:24,640 --> 00:23:25,480 could do. 595 00:23:25,480 --> 00:23:27,820 So at the Boston Public Library there 596 00:23:27,820 --> 00:23:30,590 are people like [? I, ?] Tom Blake and a team, 597 00:23:30,590 --> 00:23:34,170 and what they do is they go out to all the 351 cities and towns 598 00:23:34,170 --> 00:23:35,870 in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 599 00:23:35,870 --> 00:23:39,030 and help them digitize materials and add metadata to it, 600 00:23:39,030 --> 00:23:41,940 and then share it up through a statewide portal. 601 00:23:41,940 --> 00:23:44,260 What the DPLA does is it creates a way to share 602 00:23:44,260 --> 00:23:45,706 that on a national basis. 603 00:23:45,706 --> 00:23:47,080 So if you imagine, if every state 604 00:23:47,080 --> 00:23:49,380 had a Digital Commonwealth equivalent, 605 00:23:49,380 --> 00:23:52,090 we would in fact be building for the country 606 00:23:52,090 --> 00:23:54,600 an amazing series of on-ramps into something 607 00:23:54,600 --> 00:23:55,860 that everybody could access. 608 00:23:55,860 --> 00:23:57,940 We're about a third of the way there. 609 00:23:57,940 --> 00:23:59,940 Dan Cohen, who's the current executive director, 610 00:23:59,940 --> 00:24:03,307 and others are doing a fabulous job of filling out this map. 611 00:24:03,307 --> 00:24:05,890 If you happen to come from any of these states that do not yet 612 00:24:05,890 --> 00:24:08,920 have a DPLA hub and you'd like to be one, 613 00:24:08,920 --> 00:24:11,959 let us know because we can get you signed right up. 614 00:24:11,959 --> 00:24:13,750 The other thing that's important to look at 615 00:24:13,750 --> 00:24:16,190 are these yellow ones, the content hubs. 616 00:24:16,190 --> 00:24:18,230 Those are the big institutions like Harvard 617 00:24:18,230 --> 00:24:21,770 and others-- bless you-- who are in the process of digitizing 618 00:24:21,770 --> 00:24:25,020 tons of material and making them available in this particular 619 00:24:25,020 --> 00:24:26,710 way to the rest of the country. 620 00:24:26,710 --> 00:24:30,067 And my hunch is, if we could have every institution doing 621 00:24:30,067 --> 00:24:31,900 what the National Archive is doing and doing 622 00:24:31,900 --> 00:24:34,274 what Smithsonian is doing and New York Public and Harvard 623 00:24:34,274 --> 00:24:36,750 and so forth, we would be creating potentially 624 00:24:36,750 --> 00:24:40,690 the most amazing library that has ever existed in the world. 625 00:24:40,690 --> 00:24:44,040 And that, I think, is a very exciting premise. 626 00:24:44,040 --> 00:24:47,100 Much of it does come from the work of people 627 00:24:47,100 --> 00:24:50,120 who are literally in this room. 628 00:24:50,120 --> 00:24:51,800 This is the Oliver Wendell Holmes suite, 629 00:24:51,800 --> 00:24:53,550 which is all of those materials, including 630 00:24:53,550 --> 00:24:55,090 that first image that I showed. 631 00:24:55,090 --> 00:24:57,650 And if you think about these collections that 632 00:24:57,650 --> 00:24:59,750 once were called hidden collections at Harvard-- 633 00:24:59,750 --> 00:25:02,800 they were sort of hidden away in different places-- I think even 634 00:25:02,800 --> 00:25:04,802 if we just put them on the web and we 635 00:25:04,802 --> 00:25:06,260 have people come find them, they're 636 00:25:06,260 --> 00:25:07,485 still a little bit hidden. 637 00:25:07,485 --> 00:25:09,590 And I think part of the key to the step 638 00:25:09,590 --> 00:25:12,240 that we're taking right now, and particularly 639 00:25:12,240 --> 00:25:15,060 as we take amazing collections like the Oliver Wendell Holmes 640 00:25:15,060 --> 00:25:17,880 collection and other ones that are extremely well-curated 641 00:25:17,880 --> 00:25:20,200 and shared, we can make them unhidden 642 00:25:20,200 --> 00:25:23,370 in this same network model by putting it in the DPLA. 643 00:25:23,370 --> 00:25:25,920 Now, of course, we should caveat the problem of copyright. 644 00:25:25,920 --> 00:25:27,770 We'll come back to that later. 645 00:25:27,770 --> 00:25:32,320 But subject to any licenses that we have that we can share it, 646 00:25:32,320 --> 00:25:34,880 I think putting things in this shared repository 647 00:25:34,880 --> 00:25:37,160 makes them much more valuable. 648 00:25:37,160 --> 00:25:39,820 Second, I think that by doing it in this way, 649 00:25:39,820 --> 00:25:44,620 in an open way with an open API as a chance for people 650 00:25:44,620 --> 00:25:47,790 to be able to do anything they wish with the information, 651 00:25:47,790 --> 00:25:51,240 we'll be able to unleash a whole lot of innovation. 652 00:25:51,240 --> 00:25:54,760 So this is an old schematic, but one that came from the Harvard 653 00:25:54,760 --> 00:25:56,970 Library Innovation Lab. 654 00:26:00,090 --> 00:26:03,080 I'm going to give a couple examples from that. 655 00:26:03,080 --> 00:26:05,970 You may think about libraries and worry about some 656 00:26:05,970 --> 00:26:07,540 of the things we would lose if we 657 00:26:07,540 --> 00:26:09,500 were to go in a digital direction, which 658 00:26:09,500 --> 00:26:10,670 we continue to. 659 00:26:10,670 --> 00:26:13,190 I think one of those fears has been serendipity, 660 00:26:13,190 --> 00:26:15,597 the idea that if you do not have physical libraries, 661 00:26:15,597 --> 00:26:16,930 you don't actually have a shelf. 662 00:26:16,930 --> 00:26:19,650 You don't have a place where you can go and get a call number 663 00:26:19,650 --> 00:26:21,720 and walk in and find a book you want, 664 00:26:21,720 --> 00:26:23,720 and then see all those other amazing books that 665 00:26:23,720 --> 00:26:24,930 are to the right and the left of them. 666 00:26:24,930 --> 00:26:26,320 And you probably all have that experience 667 00:26:26,320 --> 00:26:28,153 of coming out with 10 books when you thought 668 00:26:28,153 --> 00:26:29,380 you were coming out with one. 669 00:26:29,380 --> 00:26:30,963 And I think that's one of those things 670 00:26:30,963 --> 00:26:32,490 that we don't want to lose when we 671 00:26:32,490 --> 00:26:35,030 go from physical libraries to whatever future 672 00:26:35,030 --> 00:26:36,400 we're going toward. 673 00:26:36,400 --> 00:26:38,794 My hunch is that even if we contract 674 00:26:38,794 --> 00:26:41,210 those stacks a little bit-- and we shouldn't contract them 675 00:26:41,210 --> 00:26:42,626 anymore than we already have, just 676 00:26:42,626 --> 00:26:46,290 to be clear-- we actually can do some things that introduce 677 00:26:46,290 --> 00:26:47,580 new forms of serendipity. 678 00:26:47,580 --> 00:26:49,960 We actually might be able, in a hybrid world, 679 00:26:49,960 --> 00:26:52,974 to do better than we have done in just the analog. 680 00:26:52,974 --> 00:26:53,640 And why is that? 681 00:26:53,640 --> 00:26:55,672 One reason, to take the Harvard example-- 682 00:26:55,672 --> 00:26:57,630 what is the current count of Harvard libraries? 683 00:26:57,630 --> 00:26:59,220 Is it still in the 70s? 684 00:26:59,220 --> 00:26:59,769 73? 685 00:26:59,769 --> 00:27:00,310 AUDIENCE: 73. 686 00:27:00,310 --> 00:27:03,700 JOHN PALFREY: 73 distinct libraries within a system. 687 00:27:03,700 --> 00:27:05,920 The fact of the matter is, when you also 688 00:27:05,920 --> 00:27:08,960 add in the depository 25 miles away, 689 00:27:08,960 --> 00:27:10,910 there's actually no stack at Harvard. 690 00:27:10,910 --> 00:27:12,460 There's no place where you could walk 691 00:27:12,460 --> 00:27:15,860 in and see all the books, all the collection, in the system. 692 00:27:15,860 --> 00:27:18,340 So if you could imagine a world in which you 693 00:27:18,340 --> 00:27:20,810 have the stacks that are fabulous ones in Widener 694 00:27:20,810 --> 00:27:23,900 and here and Langdell and so forth as one place to walk in, 695 00:27:23,900 --> 00:27:28,000 but you also could combine all the materials from all those 73 696 00:27:28,000 --> 00:27:30,000 libraries, plus all the materials in the Harvard 697 00:27:30,000 --> 00:27:33,254 depository in a virtual sense, and create a virtual stack, 698 00:27:33,254 --> 00:27:34,920 you could have new forms of serendipity. 699 00:27:34,920 --> 00:27:36,700 You could actually find connections 700 00:27:36,700 --> 00:27:39,530 that were not previously possible or findable. 701 00:27:39,530 --> 00:27:40,930 This was an example. 702 00:27:40,930 --> 00:27:42,960 Stack View was a rendering, a way 703 00:27:42,960 --> 00:27:44,460 to put all of the Harvard collection 704 00:27:44,460 --> 00:27:45,940 together, as you may know. 705 00:27:45,940 --> 00:27:48,950 This was based on 2009 circulation data, 706 00:27:48,950 --> 00:27:51,520 so circulation data from a long time ago. 707 00:27:51,520 --> 00:27:53,325 And the basic idea was very simple. 708 00:27:53,325 --> 00:27:55,330 The idea was you could then search 709 00:27:55,330 --> 00:27:59,142 on different forms of metadata that people have 710 00:27:59,142 --> 00:28:00,350 added into their collections. 711 00:28:00,350 --> 00:28:01,895 So in this particular case, someone 712 00:28:01,895 --> 00:28:04,000 is searching for Gravity's Rainbow, 713 00:28:04,000 --> 00:28:07,150 and they can see how many times that particular book has 714 00:28:07,150 --> 00:28:08,799 circulated in a certain period of time. 715 00:28:08,799 --> 00:28:11,090 But you also might see that another book has circulated 716 00:28:11,090 --> 00:28:12,596 much more frequently. 717 00:28:12,596 --> 00:28:13,970 You could also search, of course, 718 00:28:13,970 --> 00:28:16,090 if you're a graduate student, how many of your professors 719 00:28:16,090 --> 00:28:17,970 have checked out this version or another. 720 00:28:17,970 --> 00:28:19,594 You could imagine if it were The Illiad 721 00:28:19,594 --> 00:28:21,640 and we had 40 examples of that, you 722 00:28:21,640 --> 00:28:24,050 might want to search on which of those translations 723 00:28:24,050 --> 00:28:26,090 or which of those forwards was most important. 724 00:28:26,090 --> 00:28:29,570 You could imagine ways in which all of that great metadata that 725 00:28:29,570 --> 00:28:32,700 librarians have could become more valuable if it were 726 00:28:32,700 --> 00:28:35,660 a combination of the digital with the physical in somebody's 727 00:28:35,660 --> 00:28:36,160 hands. 728 00:28:36,160 --> 00:28:38,410 And I think that is the possibility that lies ahead 729 00:28:38,410 --> 00:28:40,470 of us, and why this research and development 730 00:28:40,470 --> 00:28:44,680 effort, particularly on top of open systems, is so important. 731 00:28:44,680 --> 00:28:47,440 I would add one other example that I think is crucial. 732 00:28:47,440 --> 00:28:52,650 Also in the Harvard Library innovation lab is perma.cc. 733 00:28:52,650 --> 00:28:55,070 For those who haven't followed this particular effort, 734 00:28:55,070 --> 00:28:58,060 I think it's an amazing example of why 735 00:28:58,060 --> 00:29:01,256 libraries have a crucial role to play going forward. 736 00:29:01,256 --> 00:29:02,880 I've talked mostly about the importance 737 00:29:02,880 --> 00:29:05,405 in a democratic society of access to information, 738 00:29:05,405 --> 00:29:08,820 and I think that is really the primary one for libraries. 739 00:29:08,820 --> 00:29:12,206 But I think preservation of information and preservation 740 00:29:12,206 --> 00:29:13,580 of where the information is found 741 00:29:13,580 --> 00:29:16,470 is equally important in many respects for libraries. 742 00:29:16,470 --> 00:29:19,840 One thing I fear is that if we don't actually think ahead 743 00:29:19,840 --> 00:29:21,950 to the kinds of systems that we ought 744 00:29:21,950 --> 00:29:23,610 to have for the long-term, we're going 745 00:29:23,610 --> 00:29:25,120 to make an enormous mistake. 746 00:29:25,120 --> 00:29:27,970 I think perma.cc is one example of how 747 00:29:27,970 --> 00:29:31,642 we can create permanent forms of digital archiving, 748 00:29:31,642 --> 00:29:33,600 and where librarians actually can lead in a way 749 00:29:33,600 --> 00:29:36,187 that we have not one as much before. 750 00:29:36,187 --> 00:29:38,020 This is a project that is currently ongoing. 751 00:29:38,020 --> 00:29:40,228 I know Jonathan and his team-- we could talk about it 752 00:29:40,228 --> 00:29:42,800 afterwards, so I won't explain it entirely, and leave you 753 00:29:42,800 --> 00:29:44,190 the chance to do it. 754 00:29:44,190 --> 00:29:46,690 But I think it's an example of the amazing innovation that's 755 00:29:46,690 --> 00:29:49,080 happening in libraries, and the importance of libraries 756 00:29:49,080 --> 00:29:50,460 playing this role. 757 00:29:50,460 --> 00:29:53,680 One of the challenges that we've put out to libraries in general 758 00:29:53,680 --> 00:29:55,500 is if you think about in the information 759 00:29:55,500 --> 00:29:57,280 era in the last several years, I don't 760 00:29:57,280 --> 00:29:58,840 think most of the big innovations 761 00:29:58,840 --> 00:30:00,155 have actually come out of libraries. 762 00:30:00,155 --> 00:30:01,700 So if you think about search, that 763 00:30:01,700 --> 00:30:04,140 has come out of, obviously, big companies like Google. 764 00:30:04,140 --> 00:30:05,690 If you think about recommendations, 765 00:30:05,690 --> 00:30:07,770 by and large that has come out of big companies 766 00:30:07,770 --> 00:30:09,725 like Amazon and Netflix, maybe. 767 00:30:09,725 --> 00:30:11,100 If you think about encyclopedias, 768 00:30:11,100 --> 00:30:13,800 that came out of a commodity trader's head, 769 00:30:13,800 --> 00:30:17,090 and a bunch of people are collaborating in Wikipedia. 770 00:30:17,090 --> 00:30:18,440 Lots of other examples of it. 771 00:30:18,440 --> 00:30:20,064 But I actually think libraries have not 772 00:30:20,064 --> 00:30:22,240 been on the forefront of the very big innovations, 773 00:30:22,240 --> 00:30:24,950 and I still think that lies ahead as a possibility. 774 00:30:24,950 --> 00:30:27,730 And with a series of open systems and collaboration, 775 00:30:27,730 --> 00:30:31,420 I think that's entirely, entirely possible. 776 00:30:31,420 --> 00:30:33,170 I'm about to bring it in for a landing, so 777 00:30:33,170 --> 00:30:34,860 here's the windup to that. 778 00:30:34,860 --> 00:30:37,724 I think ultimately, the thing that libraries need most to do 779 00:30:37,724 --> 00:30:39,390 and where I think most of the excitement 780 00:30:39,390 --> 00:30:43,011 is actually solving a series of problems that face communities. 781 00:30:43,011 --> 00:30:45,260 And as I go around the country talking about this book 782 00:30:45,260 --> 00:30:48,760 or in the context of DPLA, it's so clear 783 00:30:48,760 --> 00:30:50,940 that from many, many perspectives, 784 00:30:50,940 --> 00:30:54,020 libraries have a crucial role to play in communities. 785 00:30:54,020 --> 00:30:57,110 And that could be very simply, providing access to kids 786 00:30:57,110 --> 00:30:59,570 after school when they don't have another place to access 787 00:30:59,570 --> 00:31:01,403 information because they actually don't have 788 00:31:01,403 --> 00:31:03,130 a broadband connection at home. 789 00:31:03,130 --> 00:31:05,682 You hear many kids getting assigned kinds of homework 790 00:31:05,682 --> 00:31:07,640 that they actually can't complete without being 791 00:31:07,640 --> 00:31:09,290 able to go to a library. 792 00:31:09,290 --> 00:31:12,850 And I heard from kids who at 6:00 when the library closed 793 00:31:12,850 --> 00:31:14,740 then had to go to McDonald's or Starbucks, 794 00:31:14,740 --> 00:31:16,470 because that's where the free Wi-Fi was. 795 00:31:16,470 --> 00:31:19,530 I think there's an enormously powerful role in bridging 796 00:31:19,530 --> 00:31:22,130 this participation gap and the digital divide 797 00:31:22,130 --> 00:31:23,380 from the library perspective. 798 00:31:23,380 --> 00:31:25,002 I think that's true for job seekers. 799 00:31:25,002 --> 00:31:27,460 It's true for people who are new immigrants to the country. 800 00:31:27,460 --> 00:31:29,650 I think it's true for elderly people who come 801 00:31:29,650 --> 00:31:31,350 to libraries as a social place. 802 00:31:31,350 --> 00:31:34,460 These are hugely important roles that libraries continue to play 803 00:31:34,460 --> 00:31:36,300 outside of the scholarly realm. 804 00:31:36,300 --> 00:31:38,080 And I won't go through all those examples, 805 00:31:38,080 --> 00:31:40,610 because everybody knows them so well here. 806 00:31:40,610 --> 00:31:43,660 I think in the end we do need libraries as physical spaces. 807 00:31:43,660 --> 00:31:46,884 Does anybody recognize this library? 808 00:31:46,884 --> 00:31:48,290 AUDIENCE: The John Adams Library? 809 00:31:48,290 --> 00:31:50,706 JOHN PALFREY: Yes, The John Adams Library in Quincy, Mass. 810 00:31:50,706 --> 00:31:52,250 They're just such amazing spaces that 811 00:31:52,250 --> 00:31:54,360 have been created in libraries. 812 00:31:54,360 --> 00:31:56,756 So my argument in no way is to say 813 00:31:56,756 --> 00:31:58,380 that we shouldn't have physical spaces, 814 00:31:58,380 --> 00:32:00,730 glorious physical spaces, in our communities. 815 00:32:00,730 --> 00:32:02,730 I think libraries play an essential role 816 00:32:02,730 --> 00:32:05,980 in creating third spaces that are open and public. 817 00:32:05,980 --> 00:32:07,810 I just think that people may come to them 818 00:32:07,810 --> 00:32:10,060 for different reasons, and we may need to support them 819 00:32:10,060 --> 00:32:11,329 for very different reasons. 820 00:32:11,329 --> 00:32:13,120 One thing you see about the Adams library-- 821 00:32:13,120 --> 00:32:14,950 you can imagine at this table that these 822 00:32:14,950 --> 00:32:16,320 were big reference tomes. 823 00:32:16,320 --> 00:32:18,092 I don't think people are necessarily 824 00:32:18,092 --> 00:32:20,050 going to come to a library for reference tomes. 825 00:32:20,050 --> 00:32:21,716 They're going to come for other reasons. 826 00:32:21,716 --> 00:32:25,390 And I think part of our job is to figure out what those are. 827 00:32:25,390 --> 00:32:27,740 I think we will continue to have physical books. 828 00:32:27,740 --> 00:32:30,520 My argument is not in any way that we won't actually 829 00:32:30,520 --> 00:32:33,780 have physical and beautiful objects that present material. 830 00:32:33,780 --> 00:32:37,060 I'm not positive that the market will be exactly as it is today. 831 00:32:37,060 --> 00:32:40,050 My sense is we will have very beautiful physical objects 832 00:32:40,050 --> 00:32:44,480 and things that present in large sizes and in beautiful formats, 833 00:32:44,480 --> 00:32:46,910 and we will have mostly digital materials otherwise. 834 00:32:46,910 --> 00:32:48,860 I think things will be mostly born digital. 835 00:32:48,860 --> 00:32:52,010 I suspect that e-books will press on that paperback 836 00:32:52,010 --> 00:32:54,440 market or the market of less beautiful objects, 837 00:32:54,440 --> 00:32:56,250 but I think we still do have a material 838 00:32:56,250 --> 00:32:57,660 culture that people like. 839 00:32:57,660 --> 00:33:00,770 And even kids seem to continue like those physical objects, 840 00:33:00,770 --> 00:33:02,270 so I don't think they're going away. 841 00:33:02,270 --> 00:33:03,810 But we do have to figure out a way-- 842 00:33:03,810 --> 00:33:06,520 how do we support libraries when patrons hold up 843 00:33:06,520 --> 00:33:09,250 their hands just the way you did in this room, many 844 00:33:09,250 --> 00:33:12,440 saying I prefer the paper, some saying you prefer the digital. 845 00:33:12,440 --> 00:33:15,110 And with a trend toward increasingly digital, one 846 00:33:15,110 --> 00:33:17,410 of the things that we have put libraries 847 00:33:17,410 --> 00:33:19,317 in such a tough position with is saying, 848 00:33:19,317 --> 00:33:21,150 with the same amount of money or less money, 849 00:33:21,150 --> 00:33:23,780 you have to do both the digital stuff and the physical stuff. 850 00:33:23,780 --> 00:33:25,539 That is an untenable position. 851 00:33:25,539 --> 00:33:27,330 We've got to figure out a way, whether it's 852 00:33:27,330 --> 00:33:28,860 through collaboration or continuing 853 00:33:28,860 --> 00:33:32,920 to support through funding or it's capital investment, 854 00:33:32,920 --> 00:33:34,960 to allow libraries to be able to thrive 855 00:33:34,960 --> 00:33:37,620 in what is going to be both physical and digital 856 00:33:37,620 --> 00:33:39,340 as a world. 857 00:33:39,340 --> 00:33:41,885 I think we should do it in a global context, to be sure. 858 00:33:41,885 --> 00:33:45,320 And this was one of the parts of Bob's genius and others 859 00:33:45,320 --> 00:33:47,370 as we started out with the Digital Public 860 00:33:47,370 --> 00:33:48,730 Library of America. 861 00:33:48,730 --> 00:33:51,190 Yes, of course, it's been seen as a national effort, 862 00:33:51,190 --> 00:33:53,200 but it's been done in an international context. 863 00:33:53,200 --> 00:33:55,760 The United States is actually not the first country 864 00:33:55,760 --> 00:33:59,515 to come up with a digital strategy for their nation. 865 00:33:59,515 --> 00:34:02,350 The Europeans actually are much further ahead, at least 866 00:34:02,350 --> 00:34:05,430 time-wise, in the form of Europeana, as an example. 867 00:34:05,430 --> 00:34:07,910 And very much the first thing that DPLA did 868 00:34:07,910 --> 00:34:11,800 was to find a way to work with the Europeans. 869 00:34:11,800 --> 00:34:13,600 And the notion was not to say, we're 870 00:34:13,600 --> 00:34:16,130 just going to create one worldwide library or one 871 00:34:16,130 --> 00:34:18,550 worldwide digital library of Alexandria, 872 00:34:18,550 --> 00:34:21,419 but to say we can actually have maybe 200 different countries 873 00:34:21,419 --> 00:34:23,960 having theirs, but figure out how to make them interoperable. 874 00:34:23,960 --> 00:34:25,790 How do you ensure that from the user 875 00:34:25,790 --> 00:34:28,710 perspective people actually can access these materials? 876 00:34:28,710 --> 00:34:30,630 So one of the first things DPLA did 877 00:34:30,630 --> 00:34:33,299 was to create an exhibit on immigration 878 00:34:33,299 --> 00:34:35,090 that showed people going from the old world 879 00:34:35,090 --> 00:34:36,790 to the new and the new world to the old, 880 00:34:36,790 --> 00:34:39,370 to ensure that as we built this system it would actually 881 00:34:39,370 --> 00:34:40,594 work on a global level. 882 00:34:40,594 --> 00:34:42,260 We have the diversity and the difference 883 00:34:42,260 --> 00:34:44,843 and the innovation that happens in all these different country 884 00:34:44,843 --> 00:34:48,416 levels, but we actually connect it in a global vision. 885 00:34:48,416 --> 00:34:50,889 And in some ways most importantly, 886 00:34:50,889 --> 00:34:52,739 I put up here a map of Utopia. 887 00:34:52,739 --> 00:34:54,480 You can see it here. 888 00:34:54,480 --> 00:34:57,350 My view is we should dream really, really big. 889 00:34:57,350 --> 00:34:59,810 This is the moment when we are designing 890 00:34:59,810 --> 00:35:02,890 what public libraries and scholarly libraries and school 891 00:35:02,890 --> 00:35:05,700 libraries can and should be for the future. 892 00:35:05,700 --> 00:35:08,730 And I am not so pollyannish to say that we are absolutely 893 00:35:08,730 --> 00:35:10,040 going to become a utopia. 894 00:35:10,040 --> 00:35:10,916 That's not the point. 895 00:35:10,916 --> 00:35:13,331 But the point is we should have something that we actually 896 00:35:13,331 --> 00:35:14,565 are building toward in mind. 897 00:35:14,565 --> 00:35:16,190 It should be a shared vision that we're 898 00:35:16,190 --> 00:35:17,260 really excited about. 899 00:35:17,260 --> 00:35:20,160 And I feel like that's entirely, entirely possible, 900 00:35:20,160 --> 00:35:23,130 to put that vision ahead of us and to build as much toward it 901 00:35:23,130 --> 00:35:25,130 as we can, and to say that we are not 902 00:35:25,130 --> 00:35:29,130 going to accept a digital world or a digital hybrid 903 00:35:29,130 --> 00:35:32,270 with the physical world that's actually less good than what 904 00:35:32,270 --> 00:35:34,050 we've had in the past in terms of access, 905 00:35:34,050 --> 00:35:36,460 in terms of preservation, in terms of commitment 906 00:35:36,460 --> 00:35:38,100 to democratic ideals. 907 00:35:38,100 --> 00:35:40,810 And I think that it's an extremely exciting moment 908 00:35:40,810 --> 00:35:41,970 to come together. 909 00:35:41,970 --> 00:35:43,812 So I hope very much that you will 910 00:35:43,812 --> 00:35:45,020 share your questions with me. 911 00:35:45,020 --> 00:35:47,630 But most importantly, thank you for being 912 00:35:47,630 --> 00:35:49,880 engaged in a discussion about the future of libraries. 913 00:35:49,880 --> 00:35:51,460 And I look forward to working with all of you 914 00:35:51,460 --> 00:35:52,639 to make it very bright. 915 00:35:52,639 --> 00:35:53,637 Thank you so much. 916 00:35:53,637 --> 00:35:57,629 [APPLAUSE] 917 00:36:01,630 --> 00:36:06,150 Thank you indeed for this sparkling call to action. 918 00:36:06,150 --> 00:36:08,270 We should take questions, comments. 919 00:36:08,270 --> 00:36:09,420 So hands are going up. 920 00:36:09,420 --> 00:36:12,310 Microphones are with Dan, at least. 921 00:36:12,310 --> 00:36:13,820 So Dan, get it going. 922 00:36:13,820 --> 00:36:15,440 And feel free to tell us who you are. 923 00:36:15,440 --> 00:36:16,610 JOHN PALFREY: And argument's most welcome. 924 00:36:16,610 --> 00:36:18,140 Hard questions go to Jonathan. 925 00:36:18,140 --> 00:36:18,550 AUDIENCE: Good evening. 926 00:36:18,550 --> 00:36:20,175 My name is [? Yungtan Kamensky. ?] 927 00:36:20,175 --> 00:36:23,850 I'm an incoming student at Simmons GSLIS, 928 00:36:23,850 --> 00:36:27,480 and I was intrigued by the discussion of trying 929 00:36:27,480 --> 00:36:31,120 to replicate serendipity in the digital world, 930 00:36:31,120 --> 00:36:33,210 particularly the slide with Gravity's Rainbow, 931 00:36:33,210 --> 00:36:36,390 looking at metadata while trying to replicate the experience 932 00:36:36,390 --> 00:36:39,060 of viewing items on a stack. 933 00:36:39,060 --> 00:36:41,190 Has anyone looked at doing the opposite? 934 00:36:41,190 --> 00:36:45,580 And what I mean is taking the digital 935 00:36:45,580 --> 00:36:48,200 and putting it in the physical stacks, probably 936 00:36:48,200 --> 00:36:52,400 through augmented reality technologies-- maybe 937 00:36:52,400 --> 00:36:54,500 something as simple as QR codes. 938 00:36:54,500 --> 00:36:58,540 People all have fancy little computers in their hands. 939 00:36:58,540 --> 00:37:01,590 It seems to me there'd be some way to do that. 940 00:37:01,590 --> 00:37:03,310 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Oculus Library. 941 00:37:03,310 --> 00:37:04,910 You'd be staggering around. 942 00:37:04,910 --> 00:37:07,590 You could do it right here and just pull stuff off. 943 00:37:07,590 --> 00:37:08,321 Is that the idea? 944 00:37:08,321 --> 00:37:10,820 AUDIENCE: Something a little bit less cumbersome, hopefully. 945 00:37:10,820 --> 00:37:11,845 [LAUGHTER] 946 00:37:11,845 --> 00:37:13,720 JOHN PALFREY: Sounds like a fabulous project, 947 00:37:13,720 --> 00:37:16,830 and a great one for you to do during your master's degree, 948 00:37:16,830 --> 00:37:19,950 for sure, or PhD-- whatever comes next. 949 00:37:19,950 --> 00:37:22,272 In a serious way, I think the group 950 00:37:22,272 --> 00:37:24,480 that I've heard most talking about this kind of thing 951 00:37:24,480 --> 00:37:26,740 around here-- is Jeffrey Schnapp here, 952 00:37:26,740 --> 00:37:29,230 or others who worked with the Library Test Kitchen? 953 00:37:29,230 --> 00:37:32,100 This is very much the kind of thing 954 00:37:32,100 --> 00:37:34,651 that group was working on. 955 00:37:34,651 --> 00:37:36,900 I would restate a little bit what I was trying to say, 956 00:37:36,900 --> 00:37:39,740 which was not entirely to replace 957 00:37:39,740 --> 00:37:42,410 to take the physical experience and put it online 958 00:37:42,410 --> 00:37:45,300 but really to rethink what the combination of those two things 959 00:37:45,300 --> 00:37:45,800 would be. 960 00:37:45,800 --> 00:37:47,633 And I think that's exactly your point, which 961 00:37:47,633 --> 00:37:50,420 is some of the things that might actually work 962 00:37:50,420 --> 00:37:51,880 would be looking at what are some 963 00:37:51,880 --> 00:37:55,500 of the pathways that people use today 964 00:37:55,500 --> 00:37:57,919 online that actually could supplement or augment 965 00:37:57,919 --> 00:37:58,460 the physical? 966 00:37:58,460 --> 00:37:59,985 And I think that's where excitement would lie, 967 00:37:59,985 --> 00:38:01,920 would be that interface between those two 968 00:38:01,920 --> 00:38:05,220 and trying to make an experience that could be better 969 00:38:05,220 --> 00:38:06,766 than what we've had to date. 970 00:38:06,766 --> 00:38:08,640 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Can we navigate the mic up 971 00:38:08,640 --> 00:38:11,560 to the next place? 972 00:38:11,560 --> 00:38:12,860 Here's one from Armand, too. 973 00:38:12,860 --> 00:38:14,560 We can alternate back and forth, so. 974 00:38:19,577 --> 00:38:21,160 BOB DARNTON: John, I would like to ask 975 00:38:21,160 --> 00:38:23,880 a self-interested question, because I've 976 00:38:23,880 --> 00:38:26,330 just written something about that 977 00:38:26,330 --> 00:38:27,719 is an attempt at an answer. 978 00:38:27,719 --> 00:38:30,010 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: And you should, just for the record, 979 00:38:30,010 --> 00:38:31,220 identify yourself, Bob. 980 00:38:31,220 --> 00:38:35,380 BOB DARNTON: I'm Bob Darnton, University Librarian. 981 00:38:35,380 --> 00:38:40,970 What do you think should be the top priorities for the Library 982 00:38:40,970 --> 00:38:45,140 of Congress, and what should the new librarian, 983 00:38:45,140 --> 00:38:50,726 who will assume his or her position on January 1, do? 984 00:38:50,726 --> 00:38:52,642 JOHN PALFREY: Thats' a wonderful question. 985 00:38:52,642 --> 00:38:54,850 Well, Professor Darnton, I think the first thing that 986 00:38:54,850 --> 00:38:56,300 should happen is that the President should invite 987 00:38:56,300 --> 00:38:58,196 you to take up that post in a few months 988 00:38:58,196 --> 00:39:02,110 now that you're available, which I think would be fun. 989 00:39:02,110 --> 00:39:03,570 I think the next person should do 990 00:39:03,570 --> 00:39:06,100 a couple things that I think the Library of Congress 991 00:39:06,100 --> 00:39:07,660 has not done. 992 00:39:07,660 --> 00:39:10,750 One is, in a fundamental way, to see itself 993 00:39:10,750 --> 00:39:12,714 as a national library. 994 00:39:12,714 --> 00:39:14,880 And I think the Library of Congress in some respects 995 00:39:14,880 --> 00:39:17,772 has dodged that for a long time, by saying in part 996 00:39:17,772 --> 00:39:19,230 it's a research arm of the Congress 997 00:39:19,230 --> 00:39:21,310 and in part it's our national library, but not quite. 998 00:39:21,310 --> 00:39:22,810 I think you have to grab it and say, 999 00:39:22,810 --> 00:39:25,890 this is the national library, and we are not the whole thing 1000 00:39:25,890 --> 00:39:27,587 but we are connected to the rest of it, 1001 00:39:27,587 --> 00:39:29,420 and should actually play nice with the rest. 1002 00:39:29,420 --> 00:39:33,760 And to say that there in fact is a really positive role 1003 00:39:33,760 --> 00:39:36,847 that the Library of Congress can play in an interconnected 1004 00:39:36,847 --> 00:39:37,680 and networked world. 1005 00:39:37,680 --> 00:39:39,060 I think that would be one. 1006 00:39:39,060 --> 00:39:40,602 I think two would be then-- so that's 1007 00:39:40,602 --> 00:39:42,643 sort of a conceptual shift, but an important one. 1008 00:39:42,643 --> 00:39:44,740 And two would be to take on mass digitization 1009 00:39:44,740 --> 00:39:45,990 in a meaningful way. 1010 00:39:45,990 --> 00:39:47,390 So I think that people have often 1011 00:39:47,390 --> 00:39:49,100 pointed to the World Digital Library 1012 00:39:49,100 --> 00:39:51,760 and the 11,000 or so objects that have been digitized it it. 1013 00:39:51,760 --> 00:39:55,290 That's too small a number, I think, for internet scale. 1014 00:39:55,290 --> 00:39:58,770 And I think for an entity like the Library of Congress 1015 00:39:58,770 --> 00:40:01,420 to take up this job of mass digitilization 1016 00:40:01,420 --> 00:40:03,410 and to work with the National Archives, which 1017 00:40:03,410 --> 00:40:07,100 has been hard at work at it, the Smithsonian, the GPO, lots 1018 00:40:07,100 --> 00:40:08,587 of other parties in the government, 1019 00:40:08,587 --> 00:40:10,670 and actually lead that effort-- I think that could 1020 00:40:10,670 --> 00:40:11,990 be enormously powerful. 1021 00:40:11,990 --> 00:40:14,480 A third thing would be join the DPLA. 1022 00:40:14,480 --> 00:40:16,270 So one of the absurdities, I think, 1023 00:40:16,270 --> 00:40:18,670 of the process we've had for five years 1024 00:40:18,670 --> 00:40:20,550 is that we have the National Archives, 1025 00:40:20,550 --> 00:40:22,520 we have the Smithsonian, we have the GPO, 1026 00:40:22,520 --> 00:40:24,900 we have lots of other federal agencies participating. 1027 00:40:24,900 --> 00:40:26,720 And yet, the Library of Congress has 1028 00:40:26,720 --> 00:40:30,610 resisted our invitations for all that time, which seems to me 1029 00:40:30,610 --> 00:40:31,490 bizarre. 1030 00:40:31,490 --> 00:40:32,920 Anyway, I could go down the list. 1031 00:40:32,920 --> 00:40:35,830 But I think the opportunities for leadership-- 1032 00:40:35,830 --> 00:40:37,280 particularly in the digital realm, 1033 00:40:37,280 --> 00:40:38,940 but in that combination of the digital 1034 00:40:38,940 --> 00:40:41,775 and the physical-- could be enormous. 1035 00:40:41,775 --> 00:40:43,650 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Wherever the other mic is. 1036 00:40:43,650 --> 00:40:45,810 JOHN PALFREY: Ah, Dean Minow. 1037 00:40:45,810 --> 00:40:47,620 MARTHA MINOW: Dean Minow. 1038 00:40:47,620 --> 00:40:49,800 John, it's just so fabulous, the book. 1039 00:40:49,800 --> 00:40:52,320 Everyone should buy it. 1040 00:40:52,320 --> 00:40:54,284 Don't take the 30% discount. 1041 00:40:54,284 --> 00:40:55,450 Just give him all the money. 1042 00:40:57,703 --> 00:40:59,494 JOHN PALFREY: You see why we love our dean? 1043 00:40:59,494 --> 00:41:00,601 [LAUGHTER] 1044 00:41:00,601 --> 00:41:02,350 MARTHA MINOW: Well, it's such a great book 1045 00:41:02,350 --> 00:41:05,180 because you open up what the possibilities 1046 00:41:05,180 --> 00:41:08,940 that the digital world offers to open up libraries, 1047 00:41:08,940 --> 00:41:12,180 while identifying what the traditional libraries have that 1048 00:41:12,180 --> 00:41:13,220 are at risk. 1049 00:41:13,220 --> 00:41:16,310 My question to you is really threefold. 1050 00:41:16,310 --> 00:41:20,030 One, what business models do you see going forward 1051 00:41:20,030 --> 00:41:21,790 that can make the vision real? 1052 00:41:21,790 --> 00:41:24,100 Secondly, what legal changes would 1053 00:41:24,100 --> 00:41:27,770 be necessary and feasible to make the changes real? 1054 00:41:27,770 --> 00:41:30,850 And the third is, aren't there possibilities that we never 1055 00:41:30,850 --> 00:41:34,010 saw before, like makerspaces, where 1056 00:41:34,010 --> 00:41:37,790 the interactivity between the digital and the physical 1057 00:41:37,790 --> 00:41:39,900 may open up something we never had before? 1058 00:41:39,900 --> 00:41:41,900 JOHN PALFREY: Those are three awesome questions. 1059 00:41:41,900 --> 00:41:43,970 So the first one, which is the hardest one, 1060 00:41:43,970 --> 00:41:46,220 is the business model question. 1061 00:41:46,220 --> 00:41:49,130 My view is that by and large, libraries shouldn't 1062 00:41:49,130 --> 00:41:50,650 have to have a business model. 1063 00:41:50,650 --> 00:41:53,160 So by and large, there is a public-- 1064 00:41:53,160 --> 00:41:54,435 [APPLAUSE] 1065 00:41:54,435 --> 00:41:54,976 Look at that. 1066 00:41:54,976 --> 00:41:56,340 That's so good. 1067 00:41:56,340 --> 00:41:58,320 Basically, I think libraries are a public good. 1068 00:41:58,320 --> 00:41:59,950 And I think that the business should 1069 00:41:59,950 --> 00:42:01,740 be that through our taxpayer dollars 1070 00:42:01,740 --> 00:42:03,930 we should support public libraries. 1071 00:42:03,930 --> 00:42:05,940 And the United States really is the leader. 1072 00:42:05,940 --> 00:42:07,540 And actually, Boston really has been 1073 00:42:07,540 --> 00:42:09,850 the leader of that since the BPL opened, 1074 00:42:09,850 --> 00:42:12,280 then lots of small-town libraries-- all those great HH 1075 00:42:12,280 --> 00:42:14,196 Richardson buildings that look like Sever Hall 1076 00:42:14,196 --> 00:42:16,570 and look like parts of the law school, 1077 00:42:16,570 --> 00:42:19,710 those are the early formation of the public library 1078 00:42:19,710 --> 00:42:20,929 system in the country. 1079 00:42:20,929 --> 00:42:22,970 And then of course there's the Carnegie libraries 1080 00:42:22,970 --> 00:42:24,970 that spread out 1,600 communities 1081 00:42:24,970 --> 00:42:27,430 wide in the early 20th century. 1082 00:42:27,430 --> 00:42:29,420 So I think they should be publicly financed, 1083 00:42:29,420 --> 00:42:30,260 by and large. 1084 00:42:30,260 --> 00:42:32,680 I do think that philanthropy has a huge role to play, 1085 00:42:32,680 --> 00:42:34,680 and one of the arguments that I make in the book 1086 00:42:34,680 --> 00:42:37,720 is to say that, at moments of key transition-- 1087 00:42:37,720 --> 00:42:39,170 as Mr. Carnegie did; and there are 1088 00:42:39,170 --> 00:42:41,430 lots of reasons to criticize Carnegie, 1089 00:42:41,430 --> 00:42:43,430 but one thing he did was he put a lot of capital 1090 00:42:43,430 --> 00:42:46,490 into libraries that spread them from big cities 1091 00:42:46,490 --> 00:42:48,510 into lots of small towns at a crucial moment. 1092 00:42:48,510 --> 00:42:49,990 So I actually think it'd be great 1093 00:42:49,990 --> 00:42:51,870 if the Carnegie Corporation or the MacArthur 1094 00:42:51,870 --> 00:42:54,036 Foundation or others would in fact stand up and say, 1095 00:42:54,036 --> 00:42:57,750 this is a moment to do a big investment of that sort. 1096 00:42:57,750 --> 00:43:00,750 After that, I think one of the questions is to say, 1097 00:43:00,750 --> 00:43:02,320 should libraries be in the business 1098 00:43:02,320 --> 00:43:04,180 of selling stuff or having a revenue 1099 00:43:04,180 --> 00:43:07,200 model that looks otherwise? 1100 00:43:07,200 --> 00:43:09,660 I think that libraries, archives, museums, 1101 00:43:09,660 --> 00:43:12,315 are all asking these kinds of questions. 1102 00:43:12,315 --> 00:43:14,690 There are, of course, things that we can license and make 1103 00:43:14,690 --> 00:43:15,700 some money on. 1104 00:43:15,700 --> 00:43:18,430 This library here, of course, has made some amount of money 1105 00:43:18,430 --> 00:43:21,890 on royalties by virtue of taking materials we had 1106 00:43:21,890 --> 00:43:24,860 and digitizing those, allowing people then to sell them back 1107 00:43:24,860 --> 00:43:26,360 to us or other libraries. 1108 00:43:26,360 --> 00:43:28,309 I think there's something in that. 1109 00:43:28,309 --> 00:43:30,350 But I would much rather see a business model that 1110 00:43:30,350 --> 00:43:32,551 was focused on collaboration, and one 1111 00:43:32,551 --> 00:43:34,550 that was focused on open access and other things 1112 00:43:34,550 --> 00:43:36,600 that I actually think we have the seeds of here, 1113 00:43:36,600 --> 00:43:38,010 rather than see it as something where 1114 00:43:38,010 --> 00:43:40,430 we actually have to have a corporate-style business model. 1115 00:43:40,430 --> 00:43:42,770 But others may disagree. 1116 00:43:42,770 --> 00:43:46,510 Second of the three questions, about legal changes-- 1117 00:43:46,510 --> 00:43:49,380 I think just to state it really fast, 1118 00:43:49,380 --> 00:43:51,270 Orphan Works legislation should change. 1119 00:43:51,270 --> 00:43:53,310 So to Bob's question, one of the great things 1120 00:43:53,310 --> 00:43:55,930 about the Library of Congress is that position overseas, 1121 00:43:55,930 --> 00:43:57,422 the Register of Copyrights. 1122 00:43:57,422 --> 00:43:59,130 So the Library of Congress could stand up 1123 00:43:59,130 --> 00:44:01,460 and say, look, really simply, nobody 1124 00:44:01,460 --> 00:44:04,890 is hurt by having Orphan Works legislation-- tens of millions 1125 00:44:04,890 --> 00:44:07,080 of works that could be made available that are not 1126 00:44:07,080 --> 00:44:07,990 being made available. 1127 00:44:07,990 --> 00:44:10,694 And if somebody finds that they're the copyright holder, 1128 00:44:10,694 --> 00:44:12,860 they then will be able to put it back into copyright 1129 00:44:12,860 --> 00:44:14,730 if they wish to, or not. 1130 00:44:14,730 --> 00:44:17,210 And in fact, I just can't see how Orphan Works legislation 1131 00:44:17,210 --> 00:44:18,930 doesn't really help everyone. 1132 00:44:18,930 --> 00:44:21,300 Section 108 reform-- there are special rules 1133 00:44:21,300 --> 00:44:22,370 that relate to libraries. 1134 00:44:22,370 --> 00:44:24,910 There are special rules that allow libraries to do things, 1135 00:44:24,910 --> 00:44:27,640 for instance, for those who have different abilities-- so 1136 00:44:27,640 --> 00:44:28,880 for the blind and otherwise. 1137 00:44:28,880 --> 00:44:31,730 There are specific rules that are way out of date and ought 1138 00:44:31,730 --> 00:44:32,650 to be reformed. 1139 00:44:32,650 --> 00:44:35,176 So we've gone a certain distance on Section 108 reform. 1140 00:44:35,176 --> 00:44:36,550 We could go further and so forth. 1141 00:44:36,550 --> 00:44:38,500 So there are a series of things, I think, 1142 00:44:38,500 --> 00:44:39,980 in that area that are crucial. 1143 00:44:39,980 --> 00:44:41,510 And the other piece of legal reform 1144 00:44:41,510 --> 00:44:44,340 that needs to be tied to that is privacy reform. 1145 00:44:44,340 --> 00:44:46,810 I think libraries have done such a great job 1146 00:44:46,810 --> 00:44:50,160 of being the places where we protect reader privacy. 1147 00:44:50,160 --> 00:44:52,670 We need to ensure that the law allows libraries 1148 00:44:52,670 --> 00:44:54,520 to do that on an ongoing basis. 1149 00:44:54,520 --> 00:44:56,397 And last, makerspaces-- yes, for sure. 1150 00:44:56,397 --> 00:44:58,480 One of the things you pushed me to do when I first 1151 00:44:58,480 --> 00:45:02,160 took this job was to focus on co-production, the idea 1152 00:45:02,160 --> 00:45:04,410 that libraries are spaces in which we are producing 1153 00:45:04,410 --> 00:45:05,910 new knowledge of various sorts. 1154 00:45:05,910 --> 00:45:07,280 Makerspaces are one example. 1155 00:45:07,280 --> 00:45:09,885 The new media labs popping up around the country are another. 1156 00:45:09,885 --> 00:45:12,170 I think they're great examples of bringing people 1157 00:45:12,170 --> 00:45:14,070 into libraries to create new knowledge. 1158 00:45:14,070 --> 00:45:16,660 I feel like that's the excitement of having 1159 00:45:16,660 --> 00:45:19,010 an open application programming interface layer, 1160 00:45:19,010 --> 00:45:21,689 and so forth, which is in-person and from afar 1161 00:45:21,689 --> 00:45:23,730 we can create new things that have never existed. 1162 00:45:26,740 --> 00:45:27,450 Yeah? 1163 00:45:27,450 --> 00:45:28,540 AUDIENCE: Hi, John. 1164 00:45:28,540 --> 00:45:32,670 Pat McCormick, former student, Kennedy School grad. 1165 00:45:32,670 --> 00:45:33,990 I can't wait to read the book. 1166 00:45:33,990 --> 00:45:36,136 So excuse me if this is in the book. 1167 00:45:36,136 --> 00:45:38,196 JOHN PALFREY: No problem. [INAUDIBLE] 1168 00:45:38,196 --> 00:45:39,070 one way or the other. 1169 00:45:39,070 --> 00:45:41,250 AUDIENCE: OK. 1170 00:45:41,250 --> 00:45:45,600 I'm very interested in the API and the platform and all that, 1171 00:45:45,600 --> 00:45:47,829 but my question is more mundane. 1172 00:45:47,829 --> 00:45:49,370 In the city where I live, Somerville, 1173 00:45:49,370 --> 00:45:53,620 we're struggling to keep library branches open, to restore them, 1174 00:45:53,620 --> 00:45:56,390 to create new spaces that aren't traditional. 1175 00:45:56,390 --> 00:45:59,160 And it seems like this concept would 1176 00:45:59,160 --> 00:46:04,436 allow us to open a library with fewer books-- assuming we have 1177 00:46:04,436 --> 00:46:06,060 the platform as well; that's not to say 1178 00:46:06,060 --> 00:46:09,060 we don't need the books-- in different spaces 1179 00:46:09,060 --> 00:46:12,210 to restore historic buildings and reuse them 1180 00:46:12,210 --> 00:46:13,322 in different ways. 1181 00:46:13,322 --> 00:46:14,780 And I was just wondering the extent 1182 00:46:14,780 --> 00:46:16,730 to which you've thought about this 1183 00:46:16,730 --> 00:46:20,460 as a way of creating more flexibility, lower cost 1184 00:46:20,460 --> 00:46:23,492 barriers for physical libraries in our cities. 1185 00:46:23,492 --> 00:46:25,075 JOHN PALFREY: That's a great question. 1186 00:46:25,075 --> 00:46:27,470 And I understand Somerville has a fabulous new librarian. 1187 00:46:27,470 --> 00:46:29,290 You've got-- it's an exciting moment 1188 00:46:29,290 --> 00:46:31,850 for Somerville in particular. 1189 00:46:31,850 --> 00:46:35,250 So my preferred answer was that we fund libraries fully, 1190 00:46:35,250 --> 00:46:38,140 and that they have a fabulous physical infrastructure 1191 00:46:38,140 --> 00:46:39,310 and branches that are open. 1192 00:46:39,310 --> 00:46:41,726 Actually, one of the things that Boston Public Library did 1193 00:46:41,726 --> 00:46:43,630 was introduce the branch system, as well-- so 1194 00:46:43,630 --> 00:46:45,610 have lots of community-based libraries, 1195 00:46:45,610 --> 00:46:47,120 and support them well. 1196 00:46:47,120 --> 00:46:50,400 I think the reality is that we don't in communities often 1197 00:46:50,400 --> 00:46:52,190 make that full investment. 1198 00:46:52,190 --> 00:46:55,260 And I think that's where we have to say, so what can we do? 1199 00:46:55,260 --> 00:46:58,000 How do we embrace this future while also doing as much 1200 00:46:58,000 --> 00:47:00,340 of the fabulous existing stuff as we can? 1201 00:47:00,340 --> 00:47:02,800 I think the only answer there is to collaborate, 1202 00:47:02,800 --> 00:47:04,910 is to say that we don't need to bring 1203 00:47:04,910 --> 00:47:07,886 the same collection to every one of these physical spaces. 1204 00:47:07,886 --> 00:47:10,510 Librarians, of course, have done this very well for a long time 1205 00:47:10,510 --> 00:47:12,218 with interlibrary loan and with a variety 1206 00:47:12,218 --> 00:47:14,020 of other forms of sharing, but I think 1207 00:47:14,020 --> 00:47:17,680 those can be amped up and done more extensively. 1208 00:47:17,680 --> 00:47:20,650 And of course, as I've argued, I think 1209 00:47:20,650 --> 00:47:22,840 from a digital perspective, every library 1210 00:47:22,840 --> 00:47:24,721 should not be creating its own iPad app. 1211 00:47:24,721 --> 00:47:26,220 Not every library should be creating 1212 00:47:26,220 --> 00:47:28,910 its own various digital systems. 1213 00:47:28,910 --> 00:47:30,630 That is something that we can, if we 1214 00:47:30,630 --> 00:47:33,980 take a page enough out of the open source movement, 1215 00:47:33,980 --> 00:47:35,120 do in a collaborative way. 1216 00:47:35,120 --> 00:47:38,310 And I think that would allow for communities 1217 00:47:38,310 --> 00:47:41,850 to make choices as to how they spend what are scarcer dollars. 1218 00:47:41,850 --> 00:47:45,510 So would I rather see fewer books in libraries? 1219 00:47:45,510 --> 00:47:46,140 Of course not. 1220 00:47:46,140 --> 00:47:48,280 But I think where we have to make that choice-- 1221 00:47:48,280 --> 00:47:49,950 do as much collaboration as possible 1222 00:47:49,950 --> 00:47:51,450 to allow as much choice as possible. 1223 00:47:51,450 --> 00:47:52,658 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Over here. 1224 00:47:52,658 --> 00:47:53,890 Did the mic find a new home? 1225 00:48:02,160 --> 00:48:03,910 AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Ron [? Newman. ?] 1226 00:48:03,910 --> 00:48:07,170 I've been using libraries for about 54 years. 1227 00:48:07,170 --> 00:48:12,280 I wanted to come back to that slide and what it represents. 1228 00:48:12,280 --> 00:48:13,290 It's very seductive. 1229 00:48:13,290 --> 00:48:17,700 On the other hand, it also shows a limitation of physical stacks 1230 00:48:17,700 --> 00:48:19,970 as they are now, which is that a book, as it comes 1231 00:48:19,970 --> 00:48:22,670 into the library, gets one Dewey decimal or Library 1232 00:48:22,670 --> 00:48:25,850 of Congress number and forever that's the one 1233 00:48:25,850 --> 00:48:26,820 place where it is. 1234 00:48:26,820 --> 00:48:28,500 In a digital system you can do better 1235 00:48:28,500 --> 00:48:30,460 than that, because that book can sit 1236 00:48:30,460 --> 00:48:32,760 on many different shelf lists. 1237 00:48:32,760 --> 00:48:35,470 Is there opportunity for some sort of wiki 1238 00:48:35,470 --> 00:48:40,100 kind of cataloging system to emerge from this so 1239 00:48:40,100 --> 00:48:43,740 that many people can collectively catalog material 1240 00:48:43,740 --> 00:48:45,819 better than one person can? 1241 00:48:45,819 --> 00:48:47,610 JOHN PALFREY: There's some people laughing. 1242 00:48:47,610 --> 00:48:49,720 Tracy, do you want that one? 1243 00:48:49,720 --> 00:48:50,220 No? 1244 00:48:50,220 --> 00:48:51,910 Tracy does not wish it. 1245 00:48:51,910 --> 00:48:52,680 Anyone else? 1246 00:48:52,680 --> 00:48:54,234 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 1247 00:48:54,234 --> 00:48:55,400 JOHN PALFREY: Yeah, exactly. 1248 00:48:55,400 --> 00:48:57,450 So if somebody in the Harvard Library System liked it-- 1249 00:48:57,450 --> 00:48:58,460 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: It would be fitting to have 1250 00:48:58,460 --> 00:48:59,490 the answer crowdsourced. 1251 00:48:59,490 --> 00:49:00,990 JOHN PALFREY: Yeah, that's exactly-- 1252 00:49:00,990 --> 00:49:03,681 [LAUGHTER] 1253 00:49:06,050 --> 00:49:07,770 AUDIENCE: I certainly think that we 1254 00:49:07,770 --> 00:49:10,700 have catalog systems that do allow different kinds of access 1255 00:49:10,700 --> 00:49:11,200 points. 1256 00:49:11,200 --> 00:49:15,550 And they may not be as seductive and as appealing 1257 00:49:15,550 --> 00:49:17,650 as this kind of display, but they 1258 00:49:17,650 --> 00:49:22,710 are initial and in some ways rudimentary attempts to combine 1259 00:49:22,710 --> 00:49:24,920 digital information and physical information 1260 00:49:24,920 --> 00:49:28,100 into a wide variety of indexes that give the user lots 1261 00:49:28,100 --> 00:49:29,260 of ways to get into it. 1262 00:49:29,260 --> 00:49:31,820 The problem is they're a little too complex. 1263 00:49:31,820 --> 00:49:33,380 And so we still need to keep working 1264 00:49:33,380 --> 00:49:35,630 at figuring out how to make it both simple 1265 00:49:35,630 --> 00:49:36,950 but complex at the same time. 1266 00:49:39,734 --> 00:49:42,150 JOHN PALFREY: My answer-- Tracy knows vastly more about it 1267 00:49:42,150 --> 00:49:44,700 than I do, and from a technical perspective 1268 00:49:44,700 --> 00:49:46,610 there are a zillion challenges behind it. 1269 00:49:46,610 --> 00:49:49,460 But I think from a conceptual perspective, the idea 1270 00:49:49,460 --> 00:49:53,150 that there's one indicator for something in an old-school way, 1271 00:49:53,150 --> 00:49:55,860 as compared to saying you could have many more data points that 1272 00:49:55,860 --> 00:49:58,610 allow different ways into it, I think that conceptual shift is 1273 00:49:58,610 --> 00:50:00,470 actually very, very important. 1274 00:50:00,470 --> 00:50:04,260 And I think the trend, which is moving away 1275 00:50:04,260 --> 00:50:07,470 from having the knowledge be in a particular catalog 1276 00:50:07,470 --> 00:50:10,730 or a particular catalog entry to one where in fact there 1277 00:50:10,730 --> 00:50:13,975 are many more ways to identify the information 1278 00:50:13,975 --> 00:50:17,168 and then do more with it, is sort of an obvious movement. 1279 00:50:20,734 --> 00:50:22,650 MARCY MURNINGHAM: My name is Marcy Murningham, 1280 00:50:22,650 --> 00:50:26,660 and my question pertains to the theme 1281 00:50:26,660 --> 00:50:29,430 of hybrid and collaboration. 1282 00:50:29,430 --> 00:50:33,520 There are vast pools of financial assets swimming 1283 00:50:33,520 --> 00:50:37,720 around every community, billions and billions of dollars 1284 00:50:37,720 --> 00:50:41,040 in the form of assets under management 1285 00:50:41,040 --> 00:50:45,230 for tax-exempt institutional investors. 1286 00:50:45,230 --> 00:50:49,750 In theory, those tax-exempt institutions 1287 00:50:49,750 --> 00:50:52,330 exist to advance the public interest. 1288 00:50:52,330 --> 00:50:55,350 That is the reason for their tax-exempt status. 1289 00:50:55,350 --> 00:50:59,640 And Boston, as we know, is very rich in those kinds 1290 00:50:59,640 --> 00:51:01,830 of institutions. 1291 00:51:01,830 --> 00:51:06,870 According to my research, the top 60 tax-exempt institutions 1292 00:51:06,870 --> 00:51:12,195 in Boston have combined assets of over $50 billion. 1293 00:51:12,195 --> 00:51:15,650 There are ways, it seems to me, for tapping 1294 00:51:15,650 --> 00:51:19,630 into some of that money and bending it 1295 00:51:19,630 --> 00:51:23,860 toward the public interest-- that is to say, 1296 00:51:23,860 --> 00:51:27,940 institutions such as public libraries that 1297 00:51:27,940 --> 00:51:30,660 otherwise rely on taxpayer revenue streams 1298 00:51:30,660 --> 00:51:31,820 or even philanthropy. 1299 00:51:31,820 --> 00:51:34,630 I'd just encourage you to think more creatively 1300 00:51:34,630 --> 00:51:40,280 about revenue sources that could be bent toward libraries 1301 00:51:40,280 --> 00:51:42,025 in our nation's communities. 1302 00:51:42,025 --> 00:51:42,360 JOHN PALFREY: Thank you. 1303 00:51:42,360 --> 00:51:43,651 I think that's very thoughtful. 1304 00:51:43,651 --> 00:51:46,150 I would imagine that one of those is this one, 1305 00:51:46,150 --> 00:51:48,560 is Harvard and others. 1306 00:51:48,560 --> 00:51:52,440 Also one school that has a fair amount of capital, 1307 00:51:52,440 --> 00:51:54,160 not the same amount that this one does, 1308 00:51:54,160 --> 00:51:56,570 but I think that's important to note. 1309 00:51:56,570 --> 00:51:59,000 I think one of the reasons why I think 1310 00:51:59,000 --> 00:52:01,310 it's incumbent upon this institution 1311 00:52:01,310 --> 00:52:03,200 to do things like open access, to do things 1312 00:52:03,200 --> 00:52:06,880 like digitize its materials and share them more broadly, 1313 00:52:06,880 --> 00:52:09,190 even though there's not a revenue stream back 1314 00:52:09,190 --> 00:52:10,767 to this institution, is because I 1315 00:52:10,767 --> 00:52:12,350 think we are private institutions that 1316 00:52:12,350 --> 00:52:13,670 have a public purpose. 1317 00:52:13,670 --> 00:52:15,760 And I think if we don't see it that way we're 1318 00:52:15,760 --> 00:52:17,460 making a huge mistake. 1319 00:52:17,460 --> 00:52:20,624 Whether or not there would be a tax on these institutions 1320 00:52:20,624 --> 00:52:22,290 that then goes back to public libraries, 1321 00:52:22,290 --> 00:52:25,200 I'm not sure that that's necessarily right either. 1322 00:52:25,200 --> 00:52:27,290 But I think that it's a very interesting question, 1323 00:52:27,290 --> 00:52:29,920 and I think it's one that we have to figure out 1324 00:52:29,920 --> 00:52:31,910 how we are justifying, in a sense, 1325 00:52:31,910 --> 00:52:34,300 holding this amount of capital in a relatively 1326 00:52:34,300 --> 00:52:37,570 small number of institutions. 1327 00:52:37,570 --> 00:52:38,778 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Over here? 1328 00:52:42,152 --> 00:52:42,860 ERICA CHARIS: Hi. 1329 00:52:42,860 --> 00:52:45,460 My name's Erica Charis, and I'm a librarian over 1330 00:52:45,460 --> 00:52:46,626 at Berklee College of Music. 1331 00:52:46,626 --> 00:52:48,774 JOHN PALFREY: Awesome. 1332 00:52:48,774 --> 00:52:50,815 AUDIENCE: The ideas that are something in my head 1333 00:52:50,815 --> 00:52:54,600 that I'm hoping to hear what your thoughts are on, 1334 00:52:54,600 --> 00:52:57,140 if libraries are about people and libraries 1335 00:52:57,140 --> 00:52:58,780 are becoming more digital, how do 1336 00:52:58,780 --> 00:53:00,790 we bridge the gap between the kid talking 1337 00:53:00,790 --> 00:53:04,130 into his phone and the librarian sitting at the desk 1338 00:53:04,130 --> 00:53:05,260 three feet away? 1339 00:53:05,260 --> 00:53:08,377 What does digital service necessarily look like? 1340 00:53:08,377 --> 00:53:09,960 JOHN PALFREY: That's a great question. 1341 00:53:09,960 --> 00:53:11,350 I suspect many people in the room 1342 00:53:11,350 --> 00:53:14,290 have great thoughts and answers to this. 1343 00:53:14,290 --> 00:53:16,510 I think part of it is actually as teachers 1344 00:53:16,510 --> 00:53:19,080 that we actually have to tell that student 1345 00:53:19,080 --> 00:53:20,440 to go talk to that person. 1346 00:53:20,440 --> 00:53:24,050 We need to make that human connection happen. 1347 00:53:24,050 --> 00:53:26,250 I've been teaching United States history this year 1348 00:53:26,250 --> 00:53:29,354 to a group of 14 kids who are in their junior year 1349 00:53:29,354 --> 00:53:31,520 of high school, and I think one of the things you do 1350 00:53:31,520 --> 00:53:34,760 is assign kids to go talk to a librarian, 1351 00:53:34,760 --> 00:53:36,620 and to have them interface therefore 1352 00:53:36,620 --> 00:53:39,830 with all these amazing things as part of a paper. 1353 00:53:39,830 --> 00:53:43,377 And I think that kind of thing that many professors do here 1354 00:53:43,377 --> 00:53:44,960 at the law school [INAUDIBLE] actually 1355 00:53:44,960 --> 00:53:47,230 say, in the course of working on something you actually must go 1356 00:53:47,230 --> 00:53:48,420 spend time with the librarian. 1357 00:53:48,420 --> 00:53:50,670 I think that's actually a really positive thing to do, 1358 00:53:50,670 --> 00:53:53,370 and I think it creates connections and pathways that 1359 00:53:53,370 --> 00:53:56,220 are essential and actually breaks down 1360 00:53:56,220 --> 00:53:58,380 what is happening, when in the digital world 1361 00:53:58,380 --> 00:53:59,297 we sometimes withdraw. 1362 00:53:59,297 --> 00:54:00,880 Even though we think it's more social, 1363 00:54:00,880 --> 00:54:04,674 sometimes we're withdrawing, away from human contact. 1364 00:54:04,674 --> 00:54:06,090 So I actually think, as educators, 1365 00:54:06,090 --> 00:54:08,190 in some sense we have to construct ways 1366 00:54:08,190 --> 00:54:09,695 to bring people back together. 1367 00:54:09,695 --> 00:54:12,344 Now, could it be-- go ahead. 1368 00:54:12,344 --> 00:54:13,260 I would love to hear-- 1369 00:54:13,260 --> 00:54:14,580 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: I think you might be about to say 1370 00:54:14,580 --> 00:54:15,650 what I'm going to ask you. 1371 00:54:15,650 --> 00:54:18,040 JOHN PALFREY: So why don't you say what was on my mind, yes? 1372 00:54:18,040 --> 00:54:19,914 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Suppose Apple comes to you 1373 00:54:19,914 --> 00:54:21,380 with a proposal for your advice. 1374 00:54:21,380 --> 00:54:22,720 And Apple says, you know what? 1375 00:54:22,720 --> 00:54:24,690 We'd like to improve the Siri experience. 1376 00:54:27,660 --> 00:54:29,400 The easiest part of Siri is to answer 1377 00:54:29,400 --> 00:54:34,077 the 20% of possible questions that 80% of the people 1378 00:54:34,077 --> 00:54:35,910 ask, which is like, what's the weather going 1379 00:54:35,910 --> 00:54:37,170 to be tomorrow or-- 1380 00:54:37,170 --> 00:54:38,500 JOHN PALFREY: What's the score on the Red Sox game? 1381 00:54:38,500 --> 00:54:39,625 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Exactly. 1382 00:54:39,625 --> 00:54:40,860 Or, I'd like to buy a book. 1383 00:54:40,860 --> 00:54:41,860 Maybe that won't happen. 1384 00:54:41,860 --> 00:54:45,540 But anyway, there's a bunch of other questions 1385 00:54:45,540 --> 00:54:47,890 that are long-tail questions. 1386 00:54:47,890 --> 00:54:51,220 What if the way that we used to route letters 1387 00:54:51,220 --> 00:54:55,250 that children wrote to Santa and addressed to the North Pole-- 1388 00:54:55,250 --> 00:54:56,754 and they got sent somewhere, right? 1389 00:54:56,754 --> 00:54:57,670 I think they still do. 1390 00:54:57,670 --> 00:55:00,550 They go to people who answer the letters? 1391 00:55:00,550 --> 00:55:02,300 I don't know what the liability policy is. 1392 00:55:02,300 --> 00:55:06,970 But what if similar to that, we simply 1393 00:55:06,970 --> 00:55:10,240 arranged for people asking Siri to route 1394 00:55:10,240 --> 00:55:14,270 those two reference librarians around the country or the world 1395 00:55:14,270 --> 00:55:17,540 who would then answer through the Siri pipeline 1396 00:55:17,540 --> 00:55:18,710 and be attributed to it. 1397 00:55:18,710 --> 00:55:21,310 By the way, this is brought to you courtesy of a library. 1398 00:55:21,310 --> 00:55:23,751 And if you'd like to be more about it, blah, blah, blah. 1399 00:55:23,751 --> 00:55:25,250 What would your reaction be to that? 1400 00:55:25,250 --> 00:55:26,190 Is that like, no, no. 1401 00:55:26,190 --> 00:55:28,190 That's exactly the kind of corporate mediated 1402 00:55:28,190 --> 00:55:30,015 dehumanization that I rail against. 1403 00:55:30,015 --> 00:55:31,390 [LAUGHTER] 1404 00:55:31,390 --> 00:55:34,000 Or would it be, this is exactly the kind 1405 00:55:34,000 --> 00:55:36,770 of public-private partnership that would put libraries back 1406 00:55:36,770 --> 00:55:39,860 at the center of the meaningful questions people ask? 1407 00:55:39,860 --> 00:55:42,620 JOHN PALFREY: So I will answer that if I can ask my friend 1408 00:55:42,620 --> 00:55:45,490 Yochai to answer after I do, because he's much more 1409 00:55:45,490 --> 00:55:46,890 about that kind of system-- 1410 00:55:46,890 --> 00:55:49,098 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Yochai is playing the role of Siri 1411 00:55:49,098 --> 00:55:49,944 in this. 1412 00:55:49,944 --> 00:55:52,110 JOHN PALFREY: This is the advanced cold call request 1413 00:55:52,110 --> 00:55:53,730 to my friend in a moment. 1414 00:55:53,730 --> 00:55:56,063 I was really interested-- did you see The New York Times 1415 00:55:56,063 --> 00:55:58,010 article about is Wikipedia in trouble 1416 00:55:58,010 --> 00:55:59,943 as the numbers are declining and so forth? 1417 00:55:59,943 --> 00:56:02,170 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: They run that article about every year. 1418 00:56:02,170 --> 00:56:03,820 JOHN PALFREY: They do, but it was in the Sunday Review 1419 00:56:03,820 --> 00:56:04,240 this week. 1420 00:56:04,240 --> 00:56:05,864 We're seeing a little bit more serious. 1421 00:56:05,864 --> 00:56:08,850 It wasn't a great article, but anyway. 1422 00:56:08,850 --> 00:56:10,980 So here are a couple of answers. 1423 00:56:10,980 --> 00:56:13,370 I would be hesitant to do that particular deal with Apple 1424 00:56:13,370 --> 00:56:14,744 for the reason you're suggesting, 1425 00:56:14,744 --> 00:56:21,180 which is I worry that if what we keep doing 1426 00:56:21,180 --> 00:56:23,850 is creating systems that do not have 1427 00:56:23,850 --> 00:56:25,845 the library as the primary interface, 1428 00:56:25,845 --> 00:56:27,970 whether it's a public library or a research library 1429 00:56:27,970 --> 00:56:31,530 or a special library or a school library, I am troubled by that. 1430 00:56:31,530 --> 00:56:35,065 So the deal with Apple makes me nervous for a really, really 1431 00:56:35,065 --> 00:56:35,690 simple reason-- 1432 00:56:35,690 --> 00:56:38,177 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: So the model is free to all, so long 1433 00:56:38,177 --> 00:56:39,510 as you come through our doorway. 1434 00:56:39,510 --> 00:56:41,567 JOHN PALFREY: Right. 1435 00:56:41,567 --> 00:56:43,150 Well, so long as you don't necessarily 1436 00:56:43,150 --> 00:56:44,983 have to come through Apple's doorway, right? 1437 00:56:44,983 --> 00:56:48,099 So if it were done in a truly open source way, 1438 00:56:48,099 --> 00:56:49,890 I could imagine that being very attractive. 1439 00:56:49,890 --> 00:56:51,970 If it's only through Siri or it's 1440 00:56:51,970 --> 00:56:53,727 creating a system that relies upon Siri 1441 00:56:53,727 --> 00:56:56,310 and the iPhone as opposed to an Android device or [INAUDIBLE]. 1442 00:56:56,310 --> 00:56:57,810 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: You could imagine 1443 00:56:57,810 --> 00:57:00,040 it building into the DPLA as part of that stack 1444 00:57:00,040 --> 00:57:02,520 and have an API call to ask a librarian, 1445 00:57:02,520 --> 00:57:05,650 and Siri can plug in, and Google Now can plug in. 1446 00:57:05,650 --> 00:57:08,260 JOHN PALFREY: That would be much more interesting, for sure. 1447 00:57:08,260 --> 00:57:10,460 But I wouldn't do a deal-- and I just think of Apple 1448 00:57:10,460 --> 00:57:13,070 as the ultimate in exclusive-- somebody 1449 00:57:13,070 --> 00:57:16,310 has written about this too, as have you. 1450 00:57:16,310 --> 00:57:21,670 So yes, but only according to a structure that was truly open. 1451 00:57:21,670 --> 00:57:23,800 One thing that we've talked a lot about with DPLA 1452 00:57:23,800 --> 00:57:26,240 that's a fun idea which is like this 1453 00:57:26,240 --> 00:57:28,370 is the idea of the scannebago. 1454 00:57:28,370 --> 00:57:30,530 I don't know if people have heard this idea, 1455 00:57:30,530 --> 00:57:32,367 but it's called the scannebago. 1456 00:57:32,367 --> 00:57:33,450 I did not come up with it. 1457 00:57:33,450 --> 00:57:35,140 Emily Gore who works at DPLA did. 1458 00:57:35,140 --> 00:57:36,080 But the idea of the scannebago-- 1459 00:57:36,080 --> 00:57:37,164 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: He's making Emily Gore 1460 00:57:37,164 --> 00:57:39,030 be the recipient of the trademark infringement letter. 1461 00:57:39,030 --> 00:57:39,910 JOHN PALFREY: No, no. 1462 00:57:39,910 --> 00:57:43,180 The idea of the scannebago would be to get a Winnebago 1463 00:57:43,180 --> 00:57:45,330 and put in the back of it a scanner 1464 00:57:45,330 --> 00:57:48,600 and drive it around the country and have people bring out 1465 00:57:48,600 --> 00:57:50,355 the materials that they have to scan them, 1466 00:57:50,355 --> 00:57:51,980 and then the people who were driving it 1467 00:57:51,980 --> 00:57:55,160 would help put in the metadata and do the scanning. 1468 00:57:55,160 --> 00:57:57,590 And you could imagine the documentary or the NPR piece 1469 00:57:57,590 --> 00:57:59,630 sort of writes itself, this notion 1470 00:57:59,630 --> 00:58:01,440 of driving around the country. 1471 00:58:01,440 --> 00:58:05,950 And you could imagine it tapping into library students, people 1472 00:58:05,950 --> 00:58:08,160 who just care about libraries, the sort of Wikipedia 1473 00:58:08,160 --> 00:58:08,960 equivalents. 1474 00:58:08,960 --> 00:58:11,760 You could see it also really appealing to retired librarians 1475 00:58:11,760 --> 00:58:15,930 as something that people could do as part of this network. 1476 00:58:15,930 --> 00:58:18,619 And I actually think about when reference librarians 1477 00:58:18,619 --> 00:58:20,285 retire, what are some of the things that 1478 00:58:20,285 --> 00:58:21,368 would be really fun to do? 1479 00:58:21,368 --> 00:58:25,440 It might be occasionally to be in this particular role, which 1480 00:58:25,440 --> 00:58:27,110 I think the DPLA actually could mediate 1481 00:58:27,110 --> 00:58:28,360 in a really interesting way. 1482 00:58:28,360 --> 00:58:30,300 So I think there is a version of what 1483 00:58:30,300 --> 00:58:34,110 has made Wikipedia so successful that we could do for libraries. 1484 00:58:34,110 --> 00:58:35,590 It'd be really, really fun frankly. 1485 00:58:35,590 --> 00:58:38,190 You think about Wikimania coming to a place 1486 00:58:38,190 --> 00:58:40,170 like this, as it did a bunch of years ago. 1487 00:58:40,170 --> 00:58:42,800 Having DPLA Fest be a place where people showed up 1488 00:58:42,800 --> 00:58:45,027 and actually edited metadata and answered questions. 1489 00:58:45,027 --> 00:58:45,860 It would be really-- 1490 00:58:45,860 --> 00:58:48,190 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: It's like a collective Antiques Roadshow 1491 00:58:48,190 --> 00:58:48,490 content. 1492 00:58:48,490 --> 00:58:50,050 JOHN PALFREY: Yes, incredibly geeky and incredibly fun. 1493 00:58:50,050 --> 00:58:50,140 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: But there'd be 1494 00:58:50,140 --> 00:58:52,290 a triage area at the beginning to see 1495 00:58:52,290 --> 00:58:53,670 if there's a copyright problem. 1496 00:58:53,670 --> 00:58:54,980 JOHN PALFREY: Well, there could be that, too. 1497 00:58:54,980 --> 00:58:55,370 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: You'd turn away a lot of stuff. 1498 00:58:55,370 --> 00:58:56,142 JOHN PALFREY: That could be true, too. 1499 00:58:56,142 --> 00:58:58,270 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: These Hardy Boys are too young. 1500 00:58:58,270 --> 00:59:00,330 JOHN PALFREY: [INAUDIBLE] risk with respect 1501 00:59:00,330 --> 00:59:03,215 to the copyright, which would be an interesting conversation. 1502 00:59:03,215 --> 00:59:04,480 Y 1503 00:59:04,480 --> 00:59:07,315 JOHN PALFREY: Are you willing to-- 1504 00:59:07,315 --> 00:59:10,150 YOCHAI BENKLER: Jet lag from being away for awhile 1505 00:59:10,150 --> 00:59:12,800 notwithstanding, I'll try. 1506 00:59:12,800 --> 00:59:15,620 Something that came out in the exchange between the two of you 1507 00:59:15,620 --> 00:59:20,490 and the scannebago is let's not talk 1508 00:59:20,490 --> 00:59:23,900 about the corporate culture of Apple and Siri. 1509 00:59:23,900 --> 00:59:26,822 Let's talk about the isolation of the interaction 1510 00:59:26,822 --> 00:59:27,530 with the machine. 1511 00:59:27,530 --> 00:59:29,750 And you had said something earlier 1512 00:59:29,750 --> 00:59:35,310 about the human experience of the library. 1513 00:59:35,310 --> 00:59:39,170 You talked about the kids coming. 1514 00:59:39,170 --> 00:59:41,200 And as you start to talk about the scannebago 1515 00:59:41,200 --> 00:59:44,050 and who would come and who wouldn't come, 1516 00:59:44,050 --> 00:59:50,470 I'd love to hear more from you about what the human platform 1517 00:59:50,470 --> 00:59:54,790 element is, which is quite distinct from the DPLA 1518 00:59:54,790 --> 00:59:56,930 platform, is much more like that, 1519 00:59:56,930 --> 01:00:00,280 and is a form of a response to the Siri question that's about. 1520 01:00:00,280 --> 01:00:03,210 Even if it were fine from the corporate perspective, 1521 01:00:03,210 --> 01:00:06,420 it takes the service aspect of the library 1522 01:00:06,420 --> 01:00:11,530 and makes it available to isolated individuals. 1523 01:00:11,530 --> 01:00:13,710 And the question is, can you say a little bit more, 1524 01:00:13,710 --> 01:00:16,001 either from the book or your experience with how you're 1525 01:00:16,001 --> 01:00:19,880 thinking about building the library at your school, 1526 01:00:19,880 --> 01:00:25,260 about what it is that we do to support that human interaction 1527 01:00:25,260 --> 01:00:28,080 that libraries traditionally have provided, 1528 01:00:28,080 --> 01:00:30,540 and how that connects, if at all, 1529 01:00:30,540 --> 01:00:35,640 to this very powerful response you began with Martha's 1530 01:00:35,640 --> 01:00:39,550 question of, don't need a business model, 1531 01:00:39,550 --> 01:00:42,410 you need a story about the core of the public service 1532 01:00:42,410 --> 01:00:44,240 and about the core of human interaction? 1533 01:00:44,240 --> 01:00:46,449 Can you put a little bit more flesh on those bones? 1534 01:00:46,449 --> 01:00:48,740 JOHN PALFREY: So this is what happens when you hang out 1535 01:00:48,740 --> 01:00:50,174 with your old professors. 1536 01:00:50,174 --> 01:00:52,340 They answer your question with a hard question back. 1537 01:00:52,340 --> 01:00:54,720 I totally didn't miss that that's what just happened. 1538 01:00:54,720 --> 01:00:57,840 I was hoping to glean some of the brilliance of Yochai in it, 1539 01:00:57,840 --> 01:00:59,600 but we got it in a different form. 1540 01:00:59,600 --> 01:01:00,920 So thank you. 1541 01:01:00,920 --> 01:01:04,580 So the hard question, I think, is an important one. 1542 01:01:04,580 --> 01:01:07,060 So step one, from my perspective, 1543 01:01:07,060 --> 01:01:09,195 is the notion of humanity, which is 1544 01:01:09,195 --> 01:01:12,480 I actually think that if we lose the notion 1545 01:01:12,480 --> 01:01:15,910 of the incredible, incredible group of people who work 1546 01:01:15,910 --> 01:01:18,312 in libraries-- this is where the love letter starts-- 1547 01:01:18,312 --> 01:01:20,645 and the experience of somebody walking in-- whether it's 1548 01:01:20,645 --> 01:01:23,490 a scholar or it's a kid or it's an old person, whatever it is-- 1549 01:01:23,490 --> 01:01:25,570 that is a hugely important, I think, 1550 01:01:25,570 --> 01:01:28,330 democratic interaction that actually doesn't have 1551 01:01:28,330 --> 01:01:29,699 to do with the transaction. 1552 01:01:29,699 --> 01:01:31,990 It doesn't have to do with the transaction in the sense 1553 01:01:31,990 --> 01:01:34,240 of Netflix wants you to think about this movie instead 1554 01:01:34,240 --> 01:01:34,980 of this movie. 1555 01:01:34,980 --> 01:01:37,810 It has to do with people in a community 1556 01:01:37,810 --> 01:01:40,270 supporting one another and doing what is civic work. 1557 01:01:40,270 --> 01:01:42,950 So there's something that's just essential about that. 1558 01:01:42,950 --> 01:01:45,660 And no matter how quickly we hurtle towards the digital, 1559 01:01:45,660 --> 01:01:47,470 I want to be sure that that humanity is 1560 01:01:47,470 --> 01:01:49,230 in the mix in a really fundamental way 1561 01:01:49,230 --> 01:01:50,313 and that we don't lose it. 1562 01:01:50,313 --> 01:01:52,740 So that is really, really crucial to it. 1563 01:01:52,740 --> 01:01:55,470 Your question, though, also goes to what is the role 1564 01:01:55,470 --> 01:01:57,070 of the librarian going forward. 1565 01:01:57,070 --> 01:01:59,310 I would say in the tough love category 1566 01:01:59,310 --> 01:02:01,950 in this book is actually saying to my friends who 1567 01:02:01,950 --> 01:02:03,860 work in libraries and others that I actually 1568 01:02:03,860 --> 01:02:06,630 think the shift we have to make is to see librarians 1569 01:02:06,630 --> 01:02:09,540 as not necessarily working for a single institution 1570 01:02:09,540 --> 01:02:14,492 so much as working in the public grid in a networked way, right? 1571 01:02:14,492 --> 01:02:16,283 So there are about 100,000 school libraries 1572 01:02:16,283 --> 01:02:17,158 in the United States. 1573 01:02:17,158 --> 01:02:19,800 There are, call it, 15,000 public libraries 1574 01:02:19,800 --> 01:02:22,140 and call it another 10,000 or 15,000 other kinds 1575 01:02:22,140 --> 01:02:22,920 of libraries. 1576 01:02:22,920 --> 01:02:24,970 So we're talking about more than 100,000, 1577 01:02:24,970 --> 01:02:26,990 but not 150,000, institutions. 1578 01:02:26,990 --> 01:02:29,330 To the extent that each of these institutions 1579 01:02:29,330 --> 01:02:31,872 had some percentage-- if it's one person 1580 01:02:31,872 --> 01:02:33,580 or it's a percentage of somebody's time-- 1581 01:02:33,580 --> 01:02:37,240 which is really devoted to this network public effort, I think, 1582 01:02:37,240 --> 01:02:41,040 would be vastly more powerful than as isolated institutions. 1583 01:02:41,040 --> 01:02:42,260 And I realize that's a shift. 1584 01:02:42,260 --> 01:02:43,920 That would be saying to the dean, 1585 01:02:43,920 --> 01:02:47,370 you're paying for people to be focused on your professor, 1586 01:02:47,370 --> 01:02:50,100 supporting the professor writing this great book on cooperation 1587 01:02:50,100 --> 01:02:51,683 or whatever it might be-- you actually 1588 01:02:51,683 --> 01:02:53,620 have to divert a certain percentage of that 1589 01:02:53,620 --> 01:02:54,970 to something that is the public good. 1590 01:02:54,970 --> 01:02:56,590 And by the way, it will boomerang back 1591 01:02:56,590 --> 01:02:57,820 in really awesome ways. 1592 01:02:57,820 --> 01:02:59,440 And actually, this is a bad example 1593 01:02:59,440 --> 01:03:01,898 because I think this dean has made exactly that enlightened 1594 01:03:01,898 --> 01:03:03,790 decision at Harvard Law School. 1595 01:03:03,790 --> 01:03:07,340 But I think if every library were seeing itself in that way, 1596 01:03:07,340 --> 01:03:08,840 I think that could be very powerful. 1597 01:03:08,840 --> 01:03:10,420 I think there are lots of librarians in this room who 1598 01:03:10,420 --> 01:03:12,250 actually lived that experience. 1599 01:03:12,250 --> 01:03:15,680 But I'm not positive that that's exactly what every institution 1600 01:03:15,680 --> 01:03:18,560 sees itself as doing as every town library, every school 1601 01:03:18,560 --> 01:03:19,600 library, and so forth. 1602 01:03:19,600 --> 01:03:21,870 But I think that networked approach 1603 01:03:21,870 --> 01:03:23,690 could be enormously powerful in ways 1604 01:03:23,690 --> 01:03:25,560 that we haven't yet experienced. 1605 01:03:25,560 --> 01:03:27,830 And I feel like it's taking some of the learning that 1606 01:03:27,830 --> 01:03:29,760 has made the exposure on the web so exciting 1607 01:03:29,760 --> 01:03:32,010 and the kinds of things that have developed from that, 1608 01:03:32,010 --> 01:03:33,900 and having that apply in the library 1609 01:03:33,900 --> 01:03:36,080 space for all these amazing principles all 1610 01:03:36,080 --> 01:03:38,210 this amazing material that I think 1611 01:03:38,210 --> 01:03:40,355 is so exciting for what could come. 1612 01:03:40,355 --> 01:03:42,730 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: In both the book and the presentation, 1613 01:03:42,730 --> 01:03:45,270 you've managed to kind of capture your optimism 1614 01:03:45,270 --> 01:03:48,300 without being pollyannish about really 1615 01:03:48,300 --> 01:03:52,150 what's so valuable about the library and the community 1616 01:03:52,150 --> 01:03:53,640 it represents. 1617 01:03:53,640 --> 01:03:58,140 But you also manage to put in at least 1618 01:03:58,140 --> 01:04:00,360 two potential snakes in the gardens that 1619 01:04:00,360 --> 01:04:03,140 are really worrisome. 1620 01:04:03,140 --> 01:04:06,230 You did a little riff on what we'd call the first sale 1621 01:04:06,230 --> 01:04:11,930 doctrine that says the anchor, the platform of that library, 1622 01:04:11,930 --> 01:04:14,029 for hundreds of years has been the idea 1623 01:04:14,029 --> 01:04:15,820 that once you've got the physical artifact, 1624 01:04:15,820 --> 01:04:18,450 you can lend it to someone else, which also became 1625 01:04:18,450 --> 01:04:19,950 the anchor of the physical community 1626 01:04:19,950 --> 01:04:22,580 because you had to go to the library to fetch the book. 1627 01:04:22,580 --> 01:04:26,030 So much of just that lending is part of it. 1628 01:04:26,030 --> 01:04:30,520 And you pointed out that a bizarre paradox, but not 1629 01:04:30,520 --> 01:04:34,500 a necessary one, about digital advancements 1630 01:04:34,500 --> 01:04:37,740 is, congratulations, now we have a way of locking this stuff up 1631 01:04:37,740 --> 01:04:43,000 tight where I might have a privilege if I could figure out 1632 01:04:43,000 --> 01:04:47,300 how to unlock it, but I can't figure it out and unlocking it 1633 01:04:47,300 --> 01:04:49,360 itself may break the law. 1634 01:04:49,360 --> 01:04:51,200 So that seems like one snake in the garden. 1635 01:04:51,200 --> 01:04:54,620 I just wanted to see, if you follow the dotted line, 1636 01:04:54,620 --> 01:04:57,230 do we end up with more and more stuff locked up 1637 01:04:57,230 --> 01:05:00,500 as fewer and fewer of these get produced, because the economics 1638 01:05:00,500 --> 01:05:01,930 are just so simple? 1639 01:05:01,930 --> 01:05:05,160 You also said at the end, these might be interesting artifacts, 1640 01:05:05,160 --> 01:05:07,420 but they're not going to be mass-produced the way they 1641 01:05:07,420 --> 01:05:09,400 are even still today. 1642 01:05:09,400 --> 01:05:15,920 And the second snake in the garden is how you find stuff, 1643 01:05:15,920 --> 01:05:18,170 that previously the way to find stuff 1644 01:05:18,170 --> 01:05:21,900 was through categorizations done by librarians 1645 01:05:21,900 --> 01:05:24,880 who had professional ethics and responsibilities about how 1646 01:05:24,880 --> 01:05:26,990 to order stuff and truly try to make 1647 01:05:26,990 --> 01:05:30,560 it accessible without wondering about who paid them for product 1648 01:05:30,560 --> 01:05:32,580 placement on the shelf? 1649 01:05:32,580 --> 01:05:35,760 And now, as you say, again and again we're 1650 01:05:35,760 --> 01:05:39,380 going to Google, one in a handful of companies, 1651 01:05:39,380 --> 01:05:42,000 for all information, not just monographs. 1652 01:05:42,000 --> 01:05:47,140 Follow that dotted line out, and do you see any difference 1653 01:05:47,140 --> 01:05:50,650 from the trend that's already kind of overcome us 1654 01:05:50,650 --> 01:05:55,060 of not going to the library or the library system 1655 01:05:55,060 --> 01:05:57,100 for that kind of categorization? 1656 01:05:57,100 --> 01:06:00,300 Those two snakes in the garden, if that's what they are-- 1657 01:06:00,300 --> 01:06:01,430 what do you do about them? 1658 01:06:01,430 --> 01:06:03,674 JOHN PALFREY: I think that is a very good summation, 1659 01:06:03,674 --> 01:06:05,590 and maybe that's where we should end so people 1660 01:06:05,590 --> 01:06:06,900 can go do something else. 1661 01:06:06,900 --> 01:06:08,090 But I think-- 1662 01:06:08,090 --> 01:06:09,420 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: They're going to [INAUDIBLE] next door 1663 01:06:09,420 --> 01:06:09,820 while eating. 1664 01:06:09,820 --> 01:06:11,445 JOHN PALFREY: I'm so glad. [INAUDIBLE]. 1665 01:06:11,445 --> 01:06:14,341 That's good, since this is a celebration of libraries. 1666 01:06:14,341 --> 01:06:14,840 No. 1667 01:06:14,840 --> 01:06:16,560 I think those two snakes in the grass, 1668 01:06:16,560 --> 01:06:20,010 as they went their way through, are huge risks. 1669 01:06:20,010 --> 01:06:22,859 We didn't talk about the entire mass of the rest of copyright 1670 01:06:22,859 --> 01:06:24,400 and the difficulty of doing something 1671 01:06:24,400 --> 01:06:27,770 like DPLA given the strictures of copyright, 1672 01:06:27,770 --> 01:06:30,670 so I think that's more like an elephant in the room 1673 01:06:30,670 --> 01:06:32,260 than a snake in the grass. 1674 01:06:32,260 --> 01:06:33,580 It's so obvious. 1675 01:06:33,580 --> 01:06:35,450 But I think these two, the notion 1676 01:06:35,450 --> 01:06:39,560 of the absence of a digital first sale doctrine 1677 01:06:39,560 --> 01:06:42,030 and the requirement that libraries increasingly 1678 01:06:42,030 --> 01:06:45,390 become leasers as opposed to owners-- when you combine 1679 01:06:45,390 --> 01:06:47,610 that with the sort of general corporatization-- 1680 01:06:47,610 --> 01:06:49,610 this is something that goes back to the earliest 1681 01:06:49,610 --> 01:06:51,490 days of the internet, and what James Boyle and Yochai 1682 01:06:51,490 --> 01:06:53,790 and others who are writing about the enclosure movement. 1683 01:06:53,790 --> 01:06:55,620 I think those are things, those are lessons, 1684 01:06:55,620 --> 01:06:57,786 that we've learned in other parts of our scholarship 1685 01:06:57,786 --> 01:07:00,210 that we have to apply over here in the world of libraries, 1686 01:07:00,210 --> 01:07:03,580 and actually seek to bend the arc of where 1687 01:07:03,580 --> 01:07:05,580 the future will go, or the future that 1688 01:07:05,580 --> 01:07:07,170 will be history will go. 1689 01:07:07,170 --> 01:07:09,460 I think that's a really, really important thing for us 1690 01:07:09,460 --> 01:07:12,290 to stand up and say, we don't want that version 1691 01:07:12,290 --> 01:07:14,210 of what the future could hold. 1692 01:07:14,210 --> 01:07:16,140 And one of the reasons we don't want that 1693 01:07:16,140 --> 01:07:18,070 is because I think it will undermine support 1694 01:07:18,070 --> 01:07:18,990 for libraries. 1695 01:07:18,990 --> 01:07:20,570 And I think if we undermine support for libraries 1696 01:07:20,570 --> 01:07:22,150 and we don't support them in the way that we should, 1697 01:07:22,150 --> 01:07:23,470 I think that will undermine our democracy 1698 01:07:23,470 --> 01:07:26,120 and I think it will undermine scholarship, which of course, 1699 01:07:26,120 --> 01:07:27,820 are not unrelated also. 1700 01:07:27,820 --> 01:07:30,140 And so yes, I think those two snakes 1701 01:07:30,140 --> 01:07:32,242 making their way through the grass are worrisome. 1702 01:07:32,242 --> 01:07:34,450 I don't know how to meld the elephant stomping around 1703 01:07:34,450 --> 01:07:35,889 with snakes. 1704 01:07:35,889 --> 01:07:37,680 You're better at these metaphors than I am. 1705 01:07:37,680 --> 01:07:38,880 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: No, I was just thinking of a Mark Twain 1706 01:07:38,880 --> 01:07:40,690 quote, that everybody always talks about the weather 1707 01:07:40,690 --> 01:07:42,460 but nobody ever does anything about it. 1708 01:07:42,460 --> 01:07:45,760 And John, you're a great example of somebody 1709 01:07:45,760 --> 01:07:49,140 who is both talking about the environment 1710 01:07:49,140 --> 01:07:51,900 that we're in, and not just remarking upon it 1711 01:07:51,900 --> 01:07:54,270 but building the actual structures, 1712 01:07:54,270 --> 01:07:57,740 the roles you've played in each of these examples-- of course, 1713 01:07:57,740 --> 01:07:59,950 something you wouldn't naturally trumpet. 1714 01:07:59,950 --> 01:08:02,590 But you have just been so crucial to all of this. 1715 01:08:02,590 --> 01:08:05,360 And for those reasons, it's not just what you're writing about 1716 01:08:05,360 --> 01:08:06,734 but what you're doing that we are 1717 01:08:06,734 --> 01:08:09,620 so lucky to have you in the mix, and all of the things 1718 01:08:09,620 --> 01:08:11,130 that you've done for us. 1719 01:08:11,130 --> 01:08:13,390 So if you'll allow us the uncomfortable moment 1720 01:08:13,390 --> 01:08:15,320 of thanking you for all your hard work. 1721 01:08:15,320 --> 01:08:15,620 JOHN PALFREY: You're very kind. 1722 01:08:15,620 --> 01:08:16,453 Thank you, everyone. 1723 01:08:16,453 --> 01:08:19,220 [APPLAUSE] 1724 01:08:21,962 --> 01:08:23,420 And thank you to the Berkman Center 1725 01:08:23,420 --> 01:08:26,720 and to the Harvard Law School Library for hosting. 1726 01:08:26,720 --> 01:08:29,120 I look forward to seeing you next door. 1727 01:08:29,120 --> 01:08:29,720 Thank you. 1728 01:08:29,720 --> 01:08:31,570 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Thank you.