JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Well, good evening.
Hello.
My name is Jonathan Zittrain, and I
am so pleased to be here with you all today
to hear from John Palfrey on the occasion of the release
of his book, BiblioTech-- Why Libraries Matter More Than
Ever in The Age of Google.
Nicely focused group to get Google in there, as well.
It's very nice, a googleable term.
JOHN PALFREY: It's all SEO.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Yes.
First just logistics-- this is being recorded.
So your image, if not soul, are being captured for posterity.
It is not being live webcast, but it will probably
go up later unless something truly substantively
catastrophic happens.
And what else should we know?
We're going to go into around 7:00, 7:15, at which point
there will be a reception next door that can also
spill over onto the outdoor patio,
to which everybody is invited.
And John has done about a dozen talks so far
on the road for this book, so our challenge
is to ask him questions that he has yet
to hear from the road, which is very exciting.
He's spoken to a group as small as about 30 or 40
at the Andover Bookstore, and as big as 1,000
at a conference called Computers and Libraries?
JOHN PALFREY: Yes, that was.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Good eponymous title,
a solid non-focused group-- Computers and Libraries.
They ought to alternate every year, Libraries and Computers.
Anyway.
JOHN PALFREY: I'll send them that suggestion.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Yes, very good.
So how to introduce John?
John is a lawyer-- that gets a chortle through the room.
But that's OK, he's an unpracticing lawyer,
unless you think of practicing in the larger sense.
Now, he did do a turn at Ropes and Gray
before being rescued by the Berkman Center.
JOHN PALFREY: I was there almost as long
as Yochai Benkler, who is also here.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Ah.
I forget that Yochai also did a turn at Ropes and Gray.
Good times.
But John worked for the EPA for a while, regional office.
You were kind of in a political sort of role, yes?
Anything more you want to tell us about the EPA?
JOHN PALFREY: Nope.
[LAUGHTER]
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: As you can see, it was a political role.
And John was Executive Director of the Berkman Center
and was the one who really put the center into workdrive
and took it from a kind of small place in a hallway
to a larger place that met fire codes much better than it did
before, and that really had an inclusiveness to his way
of running the place that has been reflected in the substance
that he has thought about since, a book on interop
and interoperability.
And this in a way is a book about interoperability
and thinking about the mortar that
cements the various bricks we have together
in ways that keep civil society.
That's so much, I think, of what John thinks about.
And of course, day to day now, after having
done a turn as a professor here, director
of the library here at the law school, and now
is the head of school at Phillips Andover, which
he is in the process completely reinventing and doing
all sorts of cool things which we might hear about.
So John is just one of these people
who is not a podium thumper, doesn't shout to be heard.
He simply has really persuasive and interesting and thoughtful
things to say, and the kindest ethos,
both at the institutional and personal level,
somebody that I find myself going to for counsel
and many, many others as well.
And I have yet to receive a bill.
So that's how I know he's really not a practicing lawyer.
So John, we're so pleased to see you.
Note that in some quirk of things,
there are exactly three copies of this book available for sale
around the corner.
JOHN PALFREY: That's either a good sign or a really bad sign.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Yes.
But they will also, because they only have three copies,
put you on the list to order one on layaway at a 30% discount.
So that's a good deal of the evening.
John, you are 100% here.
Thank you so much for spending time with us tonight.
We're so excited what you have to say.
JOHN PALFREY: Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
And thank you all for coming.
This is very touching to see such a great crowd.
I feel like I'm coming home in a way,
and to see so many people that I've
worked with, both at the Berkman Center and the Harvard Law
School Library and the Harvard libraries broadly.
I'm truly, truly grateful to see you here.
This book that I have written is a love letter
to libraries and to those who work in them,
the librarians in particular.
It is also, I hope, an argument for why
libraries are so crucial, especially
in the age of Google.
And all of that I learned from those people in this room,
and I'm really grateful for all of your help in doing it.
I'm going to try to talk for no more than 20 or 25 minutes,
and then hopefully get into conversation.
I would love to hear much of what is on your minds
and be challenged, as Jonathan said,
with questions I haven't yet heard on this book tour.
This may the only place on my book tour
where somebody will know what this actually is.
Is there anybody who recognizes this picture?
AUDIENCE: Your office?
JOHN PALFREY: No.
It comes from-- yes, [INAUDIBLE]?
AUDIENCE: Oliver Wendell Holmes' library?
JOHN PALFREY: Yes, that's so great.
This is the first time someone has
known the answer to that question,
and I ask it everywhere.
This is the personal library of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who
of course was a professor here.
But this was actually his home in Washington, DC.
And I love this picture for a whole bunch of reasons.
It reminds me of the Harvard Law School Library and the awesome
librarians and archivists who work in it,
and the fact that they digitized this amazing collection
of Oliver Wendell Holmes'.
But it also to me is a great challenge to all of us
when we think about libraries and the libraries
of the future.
And the reason I see it as a challenge is this room to me
is really, really appealing-- the idea
that you could have a space in your home
that is surrounded by books in this way and sit in that chair
and think of all the great opinions
that Holmes thought up.
Now, we know he had a few clangers
and so forth, so he thought up some bad ones.
And maybe he didn't do it here.
But just the idea that he was inspired by sitting there.
And for many of us, we work with young people.
I now live with and work with about 1,100 teenagers,
and I think a ton about what inspires them.
What kind of space would inspire them?
What kind of a library space would?
And for most of our teenagers, my guess
is that this might be a cool and inspiring space,
but for almost none of them would they sit up,
swirl around that chair, and then pull one of those
off the shelf.
For those of us who've worked in the Harvard Law School Library,
I was always struck by the fact that we were almost always
full as a library.
Cheek by jowl those kids were there.
Very often they had those approved
Harvard Law School Library mugs.
And they had a casebook, right?
And they were highlighting away on the casebook,
but they weren't doing a ton of pulling statutes
or other things off the shelves-- almost
never, at least in the big reading room, literally never.
And maybe if they had a great reference librarian
they might have found something.
But by and large, they were there for other reasons.
Right?
They are there probably right now studying away
for other reasons.
And I think our challenge, in a way, in a digital era
is to come up with something that
is as powerful and appealing a space for kids
as a learning space and as an environment in libraries.
And I think that's the challenge back on all of us who
are trying to design and to create these spaces
in an exciting way.
And I think we do this against a backdrop where libraries
are to some extent in peril.
Now, I stand in a room, I realize, at Harvard,
the place where unbelievable support for libraries exists.
But even within Harvard, we know that there
are different schools that support libraries
at different levels.
Our dean is here.
Meet Dean Minow.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for being a lover of libraries, not just evidenced
by the fact that you're here but because of all you do
to make libraries great here.
But even within the context of Harvard,
we went through several year period
of quite a bit of transition.
And I was a part of that too.
And we know that there are times when libraries are
under a great deal of pressure.
That is true in academic settings,
and obviously this is a difficult context for many.
But it's particularly true, I think, in public libraries.
And as I've traveled around in school libraries--
the 100,000 or so school libraries around the country--
very often people have a funny view
that libraries aren't maybe as useful as they once
were, which I think is exactly wrong,
which is why I wrote this book.
This is a quote from an Amazon review
by somebody I do not know.
His name is David Weinberg.
It is not David Weinberger our friend.
But this was a not particularly flattering review
on Amazon of my book, and it was disagreeing basically
with the premise of the importance of it.
But I thought it was a particularly good view that
sums up what some people think, and it
is a prevailing view out there.
I realized often also when I was reading the book
that one of the most common conversations that I had
after becoming the Director of the Harvard Law School Library
was one at a backyard barbecue or a cocktail
party, and someone would come up to me and say,
so what are you up to?
And I would say, I'm just becoming
the director of this library.
And then two seconds later the person would interrupt me
and say, oh, wait a minute, libraries
aren't as useful anymore.
You're the digital guy.
You're getting rid of them.
You're getting rid of all the books.
And then they'd have walked away.
In this sense, I never had the chance to kind of grab them
and say, no, no, no, libraries are more important than ever
and here's what we have to do.
And so that's why I wrote the book in a way,
was to answer that question for all those people who
walked away from me at parties.
They're not probably going to be reading the book.
I get the irony of that.
But I still felt I had to win the argument.
But I say it in a serious tone, which
is we recognize that in many communities, when
there is a choice between money for police and fire
and education and other important things--
and this is true in my hometown now of Andover,
too-- the library doesn't get as much support.
The support is eroding for libraries in these communities,
and I think we need to reverse that polarity.
We do this also, though, I think, in the context, at least
in the United States, of an amazing culture
of support for libraries and a history of support
for libraries.
This image comes from our hometown of Boston right
across the river.
Every time I see this I get chills
down my spine, the idea of free to all;
the idea that the big municipal public libraries started right
here about 150 years ago, and with an incredibly
simple democratic premise-- the basic idea that information
should be free, knowledge should be free, to anyone, regardless
of their ability to pay.
And this was something that is in the cradle of the Athens
that we created here in Boston, the middle of our city
in Copley Square.
And so we have a history of making
this kind of amazing support for our communities,
for our democracies.
And part of what I worry about in this moment of peril
for libraries is that we will lose sight of that,
and that oddly, we actually might backtrack.
We might actually have less access in our democracy
to information in the digital age than in an analog age.
And that would be terrible.
That would be, I think, perverse.
I think that's true for a variety of reasons.
And a simplistic version of that argument
is to say, increasingly, as knowledge moves to the cloud,
one could imagine it being vastly more available,
that anybody with one of these devices
could get access to whatever they wanted.
But there are a couple reasons why that's
not so simple or so true.
One is if you look at the owners of the cloud in essence,
they're almost all private firms.
They're almost all parties that are private companies and doing
it for profit-- which is not a bad thing,
and this is not an anti-corporate screed so much
as to say public spaces in cyberspace
have been things that we've had to win.
It's what Jonathan Zittrain and Yochai Benkler and the Berkman
Center have had to create and really care for and establish.
As we hurtle to a cloud-based environment,
by and large we turn to private players like Amazon and others
to store our stuff.
So in a very simple mode, if we increasingly
create our materials and put them in private hands
as opposed to, say, in the public hands-- or roughly
speaking, public-spirited hands of libraries
and the research universities that have libraries--
I think that is a dangerous thing.
There are many other ways in which it's tricky,
and we can come back to that.
But I think it is something worth worrying
about a little bit.
There's a way to make this a bit more precise,
which is for those who've worked in libraries,
you know that it's not always possible for libraries
to do exactly in the digital age what they've
done in the physical age.
One of the ways in which this is true is the lending of ebooks.
So by and large, publishers have made
it tricky to lend ebooks on the same terms
that you could lend a physical book.
This is where it is relevant that we
are at a school, of course, because in fact they're treated
in two really different ways.
The background law for lending stuff like this
is actually really, really good.
The background copyright, in a simple sense, is positive.
Which is, libraries for hundreds of years
have been able to buy something like this
and then do more or less whatever
they wanted with it, right?
You could bring it to a secondhand book shop
and sell it, or you could lend it as many times
as you wanted or you could tear it up
or you could digitize it and do lots of things.
But it turns out that if you get that same book
and you put it on one of these devices
and a library is wishing to get it on terms that it can license
to someone else, all of a sudden it is governed not
by the background copyright law so much as it is governed
by the contract law that the company sets up,
the publisher sets up with the library.
And for all those who've worked in libraries,
you know that you can't always get e-books on as good terms
as you can get physical books.
And some of the outcomes are perverse and bizarre,
like you can't read it aloud.
Those are some of the worst of the terms.
Some of the other terms have been the 26-lend rule.
Does anybody remember that great offering
from a publisher, the notion that you
could get one of these for whatever the full price was
and Jonathan and I could lend it back and forth 26 times,
and then of course it would go away
because it would have worn out.
Right?
That premise didn't work out all that well.
The basic idea, though, is that it has not
been possible for libraries to get digital materials on as
good a deal, or in fact, as often,
as they could get it in physical form.
And this, I think, is a dangerous premise.
It's also the case that when it is
a contract between the company and the library,
there's also something tricky behind it with respect
to the ability to store it over a long period of time too.
So if the point is we're paying it
as though we were leasing for it, when we stop paying for it,
it could go away.
So in fact, libraries might in fact not
have collections if we were only turning from owners
of the information and the knowledge
into those who are leasing it, or renters.
And many people have worked on this
from many different angles.
Here, I would say, in the cradle of the open access movement.
That is one great answer to it, where at the FAS
level and Bob Darnton and others led the effort there,
and at Harvard Law School, where we've
committed to putting our materials in the commons
in an open access way.
That's not such a big deal.
But for the vast majority of what is created and published,
we actually have potentially a less good arrangement
going forward if we don't change the deal that is being
offered for digital materials.
Just out of curiosity, if you were reading something,
how many people still prefer this, a hard-copy kind of book?
Vast majority.
How many people prefer an ebook?
Relatively few.
And how many people are more or less agnostic,
you kind of do both?
Interesting.
I think that may be the growing group actually,
is those who want to read this at night
but carry this on a plane.
I think that's kind of the growth of it.
Oh, Stuart Schieber, also the open access champion.
I'm sorry, I didn't you see you there before.
Congratulations and thank you.
But the basic point being that we
need to ensure that in a digital age
there is just as much access from a democratic perspective
as there's been, if not more so.
So this picture shows a moment in time
when we were actually building that Boston Public
Library, when we were putting up this amazing edifice
in the middle of Copley Square.
It was a few decades after the library started.
It was 1890.
And the reason I love this picture is
because I think that's, roughly speaking, the moment
we find ourselves in now.
We have a moment where we are building for the future
the next set of libraries.
And it is a set of libraries that
will exist both in digital form and in physical form.
And I think we actually ought to be thinking about this
in architectural form.
So does anybody recognize this one?
A lot of people work in this building.
This is a side elevation of Langdell Hall.
And it is to my mind the moment that we're in right now,
which is where we are convening together,
I think-- or ought to be convening-- those people who
think about information architecture and the importance
of the digital era and how we actually
frame and make accessible information
with the analog era.
I think that future will be a hybrid of libraries
that are very much physical spaces, but also which
connect to the cyberspace that we are creating.
And I think in order to do that well, what we need to do
is actually convene all of these people together
and actually work in a way that is much more collaborative
than we've done in the past.
One of the ways in which we've been doing that--
and many people in this room are to thank for that;
Bob Darnton called together a group of 40 people at Radcliffe
Institute a few years ago to convene an effort really
to say, can we in fact come up with the design
for a combined public and private effort
to create a combined hybrid digital
and physical infrastructure?
That has become the idea behind the Digital Public
Library of America.
40 people in that room actually agreed to this sentence,
"To create an open distributed network
of comprehensive online resources."
And that's sort of a crazy ambitious thing
that nobody thought in fact could work, but somehow it has.
And Rebecca Haycock and many people
here have made it come together.
I think it's one example of what we
can do to solve this problem.
OK, so pause there for a second and say,
what are the elements of a library in a digital age
that the Digital Public Library of America and other things
might be able to bring about?
I think fundamentally, libraries remain about people.
So I think that the crucial aspect of libraries
is keeping the humanity in the transaction
between people and information, people and knowledge.
I think one of the challenges that people often throw out
about libraries is we don't need them so much, because people
can help themselves so easily through these kinds of devices.
One example of this that struck me
as I was writing a book about the importance of librarians
happened in a small-town library in Andover, Mass.
I was editing one chapter and it was about 3:00
in the afternoon.
A whole pile of kids came in after school, which
is a fun thing that happens.
Libraries fill up with students who are spilling out
of schools when they close.
And the kids all went into the teen section, and some of them
were doing their homework and others were gaming and doing
other things.
And one of them was trying to do a science thing.
And the kid turned to his iPhone he said,
Siri, what does terminal velocity mean?
This was in the middle of a library.
And Siri, it turned out, did not know
what terminal velocity meant.
[LAUGHTER]
But like three feet away was an amazing librarian.
And I was sure that that woman could have either told him
exactly what terminal velocity meant or at least shown him--
probably better-- the way to find out
about terminal velocity.
You see these examples over and over again,
but I think it is important to note.
And this is one of the aspects of this book that
is a little challenging.
There is a tough-love story here,
which is when we study young people
and how they look for information,
librarians are pretty low on that list.
The project information literacy studies
are probably the clearest in that zone,
that kids often do look to Google and Wikipedia.
They often look to their teachers
in that particular class.
But we have to do a better job, I think,
as librarians and people who work in libraries, to ensure
that kids actually do go and use these resources
and know to do that, and we actually
have to prompt them to do it and to teach them to do it.
But I start with the humanity as a key element
of libraries in a digital age.
Second, I think libraries have to shift
from being standalone silos-- which I think there have been
lots of reasons for them to be-- to being platforms
and to being connected entities.
So this, I think, invokes a lot of the work
that Yochai has done in the wealth of networks
and otherwise.
If you think about the history of libraries,
go back thousands of years to the library
at the Palace of Ebla, for instance,
in modern day Syria, or the Library of Alexandria--
the idea behind the library in a way
was you brought all that material.
Whatever you could get, you brought it
to a particular place.
And now you may think about it as bringing
to a particular school, a particular zip code,
all of those materials.
And that was understandable as a previous iteration
of libraries.
I still think to some extent we do that, and too often
I sometimes hear of schools bragging about how many volumes
they have or how much they spend on their libraries
in order to attract kids or people.
I think that misses the point.
I think it misses the point that by working much more
together and actually by seeing libraries
as a connected series of platforms,
as part of the network, they can accomplish much more.
This particular design of a platform
is the DPLA's rough structure, the Digital Public
Library of America.
And the key to it, in a way, is the fact
that it is just a whole pile of open source
code with a whole pile of open metadata and as much open
access material as you possibly can have,
and a bunch of different parties.
In this case, service hubs are states
by and large, Content hubs are things like Harvard University.
Thank you, [? Sara ?] Thomas and others
for contributing material in.
And the ability to export on a bulk basis for anybody who
wishes to do it.
And as you see from the top, the notion that nobody
has yet figured out the right way
to present library material in a digital age.
And the point is that we can have
lots of potential frontends.
We can have lots of different applications and ways
to share our materials, especially if we think of them
as platforms, pool the materials together,
and make it possible through an open API, an ability
to create any front-end that you would like.
So today there is one way to get it, which is dp.la.
You could go on your mobile device or your computer,
and you can find a search engine and a way
into all of these materials.
But likewise, if you go back a screen,
that's just this particular front-end.
I think the ultimate success of the project
is that any library could create on this open API
the ability to find a better way to do this presentation,
to find a way to present this material.
And any library could create an application or a front-end that
would in fact make it so that nobody even
knew that the DPLA was there.
The DPLA could be, ultimately, entirely plumbing,
and the success be in the way in which different communities
have presented this material.
That's a very different way of thinking about libraries
as institutions, but it's about taking advantage
of what the miracles of the web have
made possible and that magic.
And that, I think, requires us to be a little bit less
egocentric as institutions and much more
seeing it as a way to share.
As of right now, just a small plug for where the DPLA is.
We have filled up about a third of the map in terms of places
contributing materials into this Digital Public
Library of America.
The red states-- I suppose that's maybe
not the colors we should have used for this in this room--
are the ones that do have up and running-- actually it's
perfect, Harvard colors, in that way-- have service hubs.
So if you look at Massachusetts, we
have the Digital Commonwealth.
And if you think about what the Digital Commonwealth is,
it's a fabulous example for what the rest of the country
could do.
So at the Boston Public Library there
are people like [? I, ?] Tom Blake and a team,
and what they do is they go out to all the 351 cities and towns
in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
and help them digitize materials and add metadata to it,
and then share it up through a statewide portal.
What the DPLA does is it creates a way to share
that on a national basis.
So if you imagine, if every state
had a Digital Commonwealth equivalent,
we would in fact be building for the country
an amazing series of on-ramps into something
that everybody could access.
We're about a third of the way there.
Dan Cohen, who's the current executive director,
and others are doing a fabulous job of filling out this map.
If you happen to come from any of these states that do not yet
have a DPLA hub and you'd like to be one,
let us know because we can get you signed right up.
The other thing that's important to look at
are these yellow ones, the content hubs.
Those are the big institutions like Harvard
and others-- bless you-- who are in the process of digitizing
tons of material and making them available in this particular
way to the rest of the country.
And my hunch is, if we could have every institution doing
what the National Archive is doing and doing
what Smithsonian is doing and New York Public and Harvard
and so forth, we would be creating potentially
the most amazing library that has ever existed in the world.
And that, I think, is a very exciting premise.
Much of it does come from the work of people
who are literally in this room.
This is the Oliver Wendell Holmes suite,
which is all of those materials, including
that first image that I showed.
And if you think about these collections that
once were called hidden collections at Harvard--
they were sort of hidden away in different places-- I think even
if we just put them on the web and we
have people come find them, they're
still a little bit hidden.
And I think part of the key to the step
that we're taking right now, and particularly
as we take amazing collections like the Oliver Wendell Holmes
collection and other ones that are extremely well-curated
and shared, we can make them unhidden
in this same network model by putting it in the DPLA.
Now, of course, we should caveat the problem of copyright.
We'll come back to that later.
But subject to any licenses that we have that we can share it,
I think putting things in this shared repository
makes them much more valuable.
Second, I think that by doing it in this way,
in an open way with an open API as a chance for people
to be able to do anything they wish with the information,
we'll be able to unleash a whole lot of innovation.
So this is an old schematic, but one that came from the Harvard
Library Innovation Lab.
I'm going to give a couple examples from that.
You may think about libraries and worry about some
of the things we would lose if we
were to go in a digital direction, which
we continue to.
I think one of those fears has been serendipity,
the idea that if you do not have physical libraries,
you don't actually have a shelf.
You don't have a place where you can go and get a call number
and walk in and find a book you want,
and then see all those other amazing books that
are to the right and the left of them.
And you probably all have that experience
of coming out with 10 books when you thought
you were coming out with one.
And I think that's one of those things
that we don't want to lose when we
go from physical libraries to whatever future
we're going toward.
My hunch is that even if we contract
those stacks a little bit-- and we shouldn't contract them
anymore than we already have, just
to be clear-- we actually can do some things that introduce
new forms of serendipity.
We actually might be able, in a hybrid world,
to do better than we have done in just the analog.
And why is that?
One reason, to take the Harvard example--
what is the current count of Harvard libraries?
Is it still in the 70s?
73?
AUDIENCE: 73.
JOHN PALFREY: 73 distinct libraries within a system.
The fact of the matter is, when you also
add in the depository 25 miles away,
there's actually no stack at Harvard.
There's no place where you could walk
in and see all the books, all the collection, in the system.
So if you could imagine a world in which you
have the stacks that are fabulous ones in Widener
and here and Langdell and so forth as one place to walk in,
but you also could combine all the materials from all those 73
libraries, plus all the materials in the Harvard
depository in a virtual sense, and create a virtual stack,
you could have new forms of serendipity.
You could actually find connections
that were not previously possible or findable.
This was an example.
Stack View was a rendering, a way
to put all of the Harvard collection
together, as you may know.
This was based on 2009 circulation data,
so circulation data from a long time ago.
And the basic idea was very simple.
The idea was you could then search
on different forms of metadata that people have
added into their collections.
So in this particular case, someone
is searching for Gravity's Rainbow,
and they can see how many times that particular book has
circulated in a certain period of time.
But you also might see that another book has circulated
much more frequently.
You could also search, of course,
if you're a graduate student, how many of your professors
have checked out this version or another.
You could imagine if it were The Illiad
and we had 40 examples of that, you
might want to search on which of those translations
or which of those forwards was most important.
You could imagine ways in which all of that great metadata that
librarians have could become more valuable if it were
a combination of the digital with the physical in somebody's
hands.
And I think that is the possibility that lies ahead
of us, and why this research and development
effort, particularly on top of open systems, is so important.
I would add one other example that I think is crucial.
Also in the Harvard Library innovation lab is perma.cc.
For those who haven't followed this particular effort,
I think it's an amazing example of why
libraries have a crucial role to play going forward.
I've talked mostly about the importance
in a democratic society of access to information,
and I think that is really the primary one for libraries.
But I think preservation of information and preservation
of where the information is found
is equally important in many respects for libraries.
One thing I fear is that if we don't actually think ahead
to the kinds of systems that we ought
to have for the long-term, we're going
to make an enormous mistake.
I think perma.cc is one example of how
we can create permanent forms of digital archiving,
and where librarians actually can lead in a way
that we have not one as much before.
This is a project that is currently ongoing.
I know Jonathan and his team-- we could talk about it
afterwards, so I won't explain it entirely, and leave you
the chance to do it.
But I think it's an example of the amazing innovation that's
happening in libraries, and the importance of libraries
playing this role.
One of the challenges that we've put out to libraries in general
is if you think about in the information
era in the last several years, I don't
think most of the big innovations
have actually come out of libraries.
So if you think about search, that
has come out of, obviously, big companies like Google.
If you think about recommendations,
by and large that has come out of big companies
like Amazon and Netflix, maybe.
If you think about encyclopedias,
that came out of a commodity trader's head,
and a bunch of people are collaborating in Wikipedia.
Lots of other examples of it.
But I actually think libraries have not
been on the forefront of the very big innovations,
and I still think that lies ahead as a possibility.
And with a series of open systems and collaboration,
I think that's entirely, entirely possible.
I'm about to bring it in for a landing, so
here's the windup to that.
I think ultimately, the thing that libraries need most to do
and where I think most of the excitement
is actually solving a series of problems that face communities.
And as I go around the country talking about this book
or in the context of DPLA, it's so clear
that from many, many perspectives,
libraries have a crucial role to play in communities.
And that could be very simply, providing access to kids
after school when they don't have another place to access
information because they actually don't have
a broadband connection at home.
You hear many kids getting assigned kinds of homework
that they actually can't complete without being
able to go to a library.
And I heard from kids who at 6:00 when the library closed
then had to go to McDonald's or Starbucks,
because that's where the free Wi-Fi was.
I think there's an enormously powerful role in bridging
this participation gap and the digital divide
from the library perspective.
I think that's true for job seekers.
It's true for people who are new immigrants to the country.
I think it's true for elderly people who come
to libraries as a social place.
These are hugely important roles that libraries continue to play
outside of the scholarly realm.
And I won't go through all those examples,
because everybody knows them so well here.
I think in the end we do need libraries as physical spaces.
Does anybody recognize this library?
AUDIENCE: The John Adams Library?
JOHN PALFREY: Yes, The John Adams Library in Quincy, Mass.
They're just such amazing spaces that
have been created in libraries.
So my argument in no way is to say
that we shouldn't have physical spaces,
glorious physical spaces, in our communities.
I think libraries play an essential role
in creating third spaces that are open and public.
I just think that people may come to them
for different reasons, and we may need to support them
for very different reasons.
One thing you see about the Adams library--
you can imagine at this table that these
were big reference tomes.
I don't think people are necessarily
going to come to a library for reference tomes.
They're going to come for other reasons.
And I think part of our job is to figure out what those are.
I think we will continue to have physical books.
My argument is not in any way that we won't actually
have physical and beautiful objects that present material.
I'm not positive that the market will be exactly as it is today.
My sense is we will have very beautiful physical objects
and things that present in large sizes and in beautiful formats,
and we will have mostly digital materials otherwise.
I think things will be mostly born digital.
I suspect that e-books will press on that paperback
market or the market of less beautiful objects,
but I think we still do have a material
culture that people like.
And even kids seem to continue like those physical objects,
so I don't think they're going away.
But we do have to figure out a way--
how do we support libraries when patrons hold up
their hands just the way you did in this room, many
saying I prefer the paper, some saying you prefer the digital.
And with a trend toward increasingly digital, one
of the things that we have put libraries
in such a tough position with is saying,
with the same amount of money or less money,
you have to do both the digital stuff and the physical stuff.
That is an untenable position.
We've got to figure out a way, whether it's
through collaboration or continuing
to support through funding or it's capital investment,
to allow libraries to be able to thrive
in what is going to be both physical and digital
as a world.
I think we should do it in a global context, to be sure.
And this was one of the parts of Bob's genius and others
as we started out with the Digital Public
Library of America.
Yes, of course, it's been seen as a national effort,
but it's been done in an international context.
The United States is actually not the first country
to come up with a digital strategy for their nation.
The Europeans actually are much further ahead, at least
time-wise, in the form of Europeana, as an example.
And very much the first thing that DPLA did
was to find a way to work with the Europeans.
And the notion was not to say, we're
just going to create one worldwide library or one
worldwide digital library of Alexandria,
but to say we can actually have maybe 200 different countries
having theirs, but figure out how to make them interoperable.
How do you ensure that from the user
perspective people actually can access these materials?
So one of the first things DPLA did
was to create an exhibit on immigration
that showed people going from the old world
to the new and the new world to the old,
to ensure that as we built this system it would actually
work on a global level.
We have the diversity and the difference
and the innovation that happens in all these different country
levels, but we actually connect it in a global vision.
And in some ways most importantly,
I put up here a map of Utopia.
You can see it here.
My view is we should dream really, really big.
This is the moment when we are designing
what public libraries and scholarly libraries and school
libraries can and should be for the future.
And I am not so pollyannish to say that we are absolutely
going to become a utopia.
That's not the point.
But the point is we should have something that we actually
are building toward in mind.
It should be a shared vision that we're
really excited about.
And I feel like that's entirely, entirely possible,
to put that vision ahead of us and to build as much toward it
as we can, and to say that we are not
going to accept a digital world or a digital hybrid
with the physical world that's actually less good than what
we've had in the past in terms of access,
in terms of preservation, in terms of commitment
to democratic ideals.
And I think that it's an extremely exciting moment
to come together.
So I hope very much that you will
share your questions with me.
But most importantly, thank you for being
engaged in a discussion about the future of libraries.
And I look forward to working with all of you
to make it very bright.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you indeed for this sparkling call to action.
We should take questions, comments.
So hands are going up.
Microphones are with Dan, at least.
So Dan, get it going.
And feel free to tell us who you are.
JOHN PALFREY: And argument's most welcome.
Hard questions go to Jonathan.
AUDIENCE: Good evening.
My name is [? Yungtan Kamensky. ?]
I'm an incoming student at Simmons GSLIS,
and I was intrigued by the discussion of trying
to replicate serendipity in the digital world,
particularly the slide with Gravity's Rainbow,
looking at metadata while trying to replicate the experience
of viewing items on a stack.
Has anyone looked at doing the opposite?
And what I mean is taking the digital
and putting it in the physical stacks, probably
through augmented reality technologies-- maybe
something as simple as QR codes.
People all have fancy little computers in their hands.
It seems to me there'd be some way to do that.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Oculus Library.
You'd be staggering around.
You could do it right here and just pull stuff off.
Is that the idea?
AUDIENCE: Something a little bit less cumbersome, hopefully.
[LAUGHTER]
JOHN PALFREY: Sounds like a fabulous project,
and a great one for you to do during your master's degree,
for sure, or PhD-- whatever comes next.
In a serious way, I think the group
that I've heard most talking about this kind of thing
around here-- is Jeffrey Schnapp here,
or others who worked with the Library Test Kitchen?
This is very much the kind of thing
that group was working on.
I would restate a little bit what I was trying to say,
which was not entirely to replace
to take the physical experience and put it online
but really to rethink what the combination of those two things
would be.
And I think that's exactly your point, which
is some of the things that might actually work
would be looking at what are some
of the pathways that people use today
online that actually could supplement or augment
the physical?
And I think that's where excitement would lie,
would be that interface between those two
and trying to make an experience that could be better
than what we've had to date.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Can we navigate the mic up
to the next place?
Here's one from Armand, too.
We can alternate back and forth, so.
BOB DARNTON: John, I would like to ask
a self-interested question, because I've
just written something about that
is an attempt at an answer.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: And you should, just for the record,
identify yourself, Bob.
BOB DARNTON: I'm Bob Darnton, University Librarian.
What do you think should be the top priorities for the Library
of Congress, and what should the new librarian,
who will assume his or her position on January 1, do?
JOHN PALFREY: Thats' a wonderful question.
Well, Professor Darnton, I think the first thing that
should happen is that the President should invite
you to take up that post in a few months
now that you're available, which I think would be fun.
I think the next person should do
a couple things that I think the Library of Congress
has not done.
One is, in a fundamental way, to see itself
as a national library.
And I think the Library of Congress in some respects
has dodged that for a long time, by saying in part
it's a research arm of the Congress
and in part it's our national library, but not quite.
I think you have to grab it and say,
this is the national library, and we are not the whole thing
but we are connected to the rest of it,
and should actually play nice with the rest.
And to say that there in fact is a really positive role
that the Library of Congress can play in an interconnected
and networked world.
I think that would be one.
I think two would be then-- so that's
sort of a conceptual shift, but an important one.
And two would be to take on mass digitization
in a meaningful way.
So I think that people have often
pointed to the World Digital Library
and the 11,000 or so objects that have been digitized it it.
That's too small a number, I think, for internet scale.
And I think for an entity like the Library of Congress
to take up this job of mass digitilization
and to work with the National Archives, which
has been hard at work at it, the Smithsonian, the GPO, lots
of other parties in the government,
and actually lead that effort-- I think that could
be enormously powerful.
A third thing would be join the DPLA.
So one of the absurdities, I think,
of the process we've had for five years
is that we have the National Archives,
we have the Smithsonian, we have the GPO,
we have lots of other federal agencies participating.
And yet, the Library of Congress has
resisted our invitations for all that time, which seems to me
bizarre.
Anyway, I could go down the list.
But I think the opportunities for leadership--
particularly in the digital realm,
but in that combination of the digital
and the physical-- could be enormous.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Wherever the other mic is.
JOHN PALFREY: Ah, Dean Minow.
MARTHA MINOW: Dean Minow.
John, it's just so fabulous, the book.
Everyone should buy it.
Don't take the 30% discount.
Just give him all the money.
JOHN PALFREY: You see why we love our dean?
[LAUGHTER]
MARTHA MINOW: Well, it's such a great book
because you open up what the possibilities
that the digital world offers to open up libraries,
while identifying what the traditional libraries have that
are at risk.
My question to you is really threefold.
One, what business models do you see going forward
that can make the vision real?
Secondly, what legal changes would
be necessary and feasible to make the changes real?
And the third is, aren't there possibilities that we never
saw before, like makerspaces, where
the interactivity between the digital and the physical
may open up something we never had before?
JOHN PALFREY: Those are three awesome questions.
So the first one, which is the hardest one,
is the business model question.
My view is that by and large, libraries shouldn't
have to have a business model.
So by and large, there is a public--
[APPLAUSE]
Look at that.
That's so good.
Basically, I think libraries are a public good.
And I think that the business should
be that through our taxpayer dollars
we should support public libraries.
And the United States really is the leader.
And actually, Boston really has been
the leader of that since the BPL opened,
then lots of small-town libraries-- all those great HH
Richardson buildings that look like Sever Hall
and look like parts of the law school,
those are the early formation of the public library
system in the country.
And then of course there's the Carnegie libraries
that spread out 1,600 communities
wide in the early 20th century.
So I think they should be publicly financed,
by and large.
I do think that philanthropy has a huge role to play,
and one of the arguments that I make in the book
is to say that, at moments of key transition--
as Mr. Carnegie did; and there are
lots of reasons to criticize Carnegie,
but one thing he did was he put a lot of capital
into libraries that spread them from big cities
into lots of small towns at a crucial moment.
So I actually think it'd be great
if the Carnegie Corporation or the MacArthur
Foundation or others would in fact stand up and say,
this is a moment to do a big investment of that sort.
After that, I think one of the questions is to say,
should libraries be in the business
of selling stuff or having a revenue
model that looks otherwise?
I think that libraries, archives, museums,
are all asking these kinds of questions.
There are, of course, things that we can license and make
some money on.
This library here, of course, has made some amount of money
on royalties by virtue of taking materials we had
and digitizing those, allowing people then to sell them back
to us or other libraries.
I think there's something in that.
But I would much rather see a business model that
was focused on collaboration, and one
that was focused on open access and other things
that I actually think we have the seeds of here,
rather than see it as something where
we actually have to have a corporate-style business model.
But others may disagree.
Second of the three questions, about legal changes--
I think just to state it really fast,
Orphan Works legislation should change.
So to Bob's question, one of the great things
about the Library of Congress is that position overseas,
the Register of Copyrights.
So the Library of Congress could stand up
and say, look, really simply, nobody
is hurt by having Orphan Works legislation-- tens of millions
of works that could be made available that are not
being made available.
And if somebody finds that they're the copyright holder,
they then will be able to put it back into copyright
if they wish to, or not.
And in fact, I just can't see how Orphan Works legislation
doesn't really help everyone.
Section 108 reform-- there are special rules
that relate to libraries.
There are special rules that allow libraries to do things,
for instance, for those who have different abilities-- so
for the blind and otherwise.
There are specific rules that are way out of date and ought
to be reformed.
So we've gone a certain distance on Section 108 reform.
We could go further and so forth.
So there are a series of things, I think,
in that area that are crucial.
And the other piece of legal reform
that needs to be tied to that is privacy reform.
I think libraries have done such a great job
of being the places where we protect reader privacy.
We need to ensure that the law allows libraries
to do that on an ongoing basis.
And last, makerspaces-- yes, for sure.
One of the things you pushed me to do when I first
took this job was to focus on co-production, the idea
that libraries are spaces in which we are producing
new knowledge of various sorts.
Makerspaces are one example.
The new media labs popping up around the country are another.
I think they're great examples of bringing people
into libraries to create new knowledge.
I feel like that's the excitement of having
an open application programming interface layer,
and so forth, which is in-person and from afar
we can create new things that have never existed.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Hi, John.
Pat McCormick, former student, Kennedy School grad.
I can't wait to read the book.
So excuse me if this is in the book.
JOHN PALFREY: No problem. [INAUDIBLE]
one way or the other.
AUDIENCE: OK.
I'm very interested in the API and the platform and all that,
but my question is more mundane.
In the city where I live, Somerville,
we're struggling to keep library branches open, to restore them,
to create new spaces that aren't traditional.
And it seems like this concept would
allow us to open a library with fewer books-- assuming we have
the platform as well; that's not to say
we don't need the books-- in different spaces
to restore historic buildings and reuse them
in different ways.
And I was just wondering the extent
to which you've thought about this
as a way of creating more flexibility, lower cost
barriers for physical libraries in our cities.
JOHN PALFREY: That's a great question.
And I understand Somerville has a fabulous new librarian.
You've got-- it's an exciting moment
for Somerville in particular.
So my preferred answer was that we fund libraries fully,
and that they have a fabulous physical infrastructure
and branches that are open.
Actually, one of the things that Boston Public Library did
was introduce the branch system, as well-- so
have lots of community-based libraries,
and support them well.
I think the reality is that we don't in communities often
make that full investment.
And I think that's where we have to say, so what can we do?
How do we embrace this future while also doing as much
of the fabulous existing stuff as we can?
I think the only answer there is to collaborate,
is to say that we don't need to bring
the same collection to every one of these physical spaces.
Librarians, of course, have done this very well for a long time
with interlibrary loan and with a variety
of other forms of sharing, but I think
those can be amped up and done more extensively.
And of course, as I've argued, I think
from a digital perspective, every library
should not be creating its own iPad app.
Not every library should be creating
its own various digital systems.
That is something that we can, if we
take a page enough out of the open source movement,
do in a collaborative way.
And I think that would allow for communities
to make choices as to how they spend what are scarcer dollars.
So would I rather see fewer books in libraries?
Of course not.
But I think where we have to make that choice--
do as much collaboration as possible
to allow as much choice as possible.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Over here.
Did the mic find a new home?
AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Ron [? Newman. ?]
I've been using libraries for about 54 years.
I wanted to come back to that slide and what it represents.
It's very seductive.
On the other hand, it also shows a limitation of physical stacks
as they are now, which is that a book, as it comes
into the library, gets one Dewey decimal or Library
of Congress number and forever that's the one
place where it is.
In a digital system you can do better
than that, because that book can sit
on many different shelf lists.
Is there opportunity for some sort of wiki
kind of cataloging system to emerge from this so
that many people can collectively catalog material
better than one person can?
JOHN PALFREY: There's some people laughing.
Tracy, do you want that one?
No?
Tracy does not wish it.
Anyone else?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
JOHN PALFREY: Yeah, exactly.
So if somebody in the Harvard Library System liked it--
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: It would be fitting to have
the answer crowdsourced.
JOHN PALFREY: Yeah, that's exactly--
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I certainly think that we
have catalog systems that do allow different kinds of access
points.
And they may not be as seductive and as appealing
as this kind of display, but they
are initial and in some ways rudimentary attempts to combine
digital information and physical information
into a wide variety of indexes that give the user lots
of ways to get into it.
The problem is they're a little too complex.
And so we still need to keep working
at figuring out how to make it both simple
but complex at the same time.
JOHN PALFREY: My answer-- Tracy knows vastly more about it
than I do, and from a technical perspective
there are a zillion challenges behind it.
But I think from a conceptual perspective, the idea
that there's one indicator for something in an old-school way,
as compared to saying you could have many more data points that
allow different ways into it, I think that conceptual shift is
actually very, very important.
And I think the trend, which is moving away
from having the knowledge be in a particular catalog
or a particular catalog entry to one where in fact there
are many more ways to identify the information
and then do more with it, is sort of an obvious movement.
MARCY MURNINGHAM: My name is Marcy Murningham,
and my question pertains to the theme
of hybrid and collaboration.
There are vast pools of financial assets swimming
around every community, billions and billions of dollars
in the form of assets under management
for tax-exempt institutional investors.
In theory, those tax-exempt institutions
exist to advance the public interest.
That is the reason for their tax-exempt status.
And Boston, as we know, is very rich in those kinds
of institutions.
According to my research, the top 60 tax-exempt institutions
in Boston have combined assets of over $50 billion.
There are ways, it seems to me, for tapping
into some of that money and bending it
toward the public interest-- that is to say,
institutions such as public libraries that
otherwise rely on taxpayer revenue streams
or even philanthropy.
I'd just encourage you to think more creatively
about revenue sources that could be bent toward libraries
in our nation's communities.
JOHN PALFREY: Thank you.
I think that's very thoughtful.
I would imagine that one of those is this one,
is Harvard and others.
Also one school that has a fair amount of capital,
not the same amount that this one does,
but I think that's important to note.
I think one of the reasons why I think
it's incumbent upon this institution
to do things like open access, to do things
like digitize its materials and share them more broadly,
even though there's not a revenue stream back
to this institution, is because I
think we are private institutions that
have a public purpose.
And I think if we don't see it that way we're
making a huge mistake.
Whether or not there would be a tax on these institutions
that then goes back to public libraries,
I'm not sure that that's necessarily right either.
But I think that it's a very interesting question,
and I think it's one that we have to figure out
how we are justifying, in a sense,
holding this amount of capital in a relatively
small number of institutions.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Over here?
ERICA CHARIS: Hi.
My name's Erica Charis, and I'm a librarian over
at Berklee College of Music.
JOHN PALFREY: Awesome.
AUDIENCE: The ideas that are something in my head
that I'm hoping to hear what your thoughts are on,
if libraries are about people and libraries
are becoming more digital, how do
we bridge the gap between the kid talking
into his phone and the librarian sitting at the desk
three feet away?
What does digital service necessarily look like?
JOHN PALFREY: That's a great question.
I suspect many people in the room
have great thoughts and answers to this.
I think part of it is actually as teachers
that we actually have to tell that student
to go talk to that person.
We need to make that human connection happen.
I've been teaching United States history this year
to a group of 14 kids who are in their junior year
of high school, and I think one of the things you do
is assign kids to go talk to a librarian,
and to have them interface therefore
with all these amazing things as part of a paper.
And I think that kind of thing that many professors do here
at the law school [INAUDIBLE] actually
say, in the course of working on something you actually must go
spend time with the librarian.
I think that's actually a really positive thing to do,
and I think it creates connections and pathways that
are essential and actually breaks down
what is happening, when in the digital world
we sometimes withdraw.
Even though we think it's more social,
sometimes we're withdrawing, away from human contact.
So I actually think, as educators,
in some sense we have to construct ways
to bring people back together.
Now, could it be-- go ahead.
I would love to hear--
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: I think you might be about to say
what I'm going to ask you.
JOHN PALFREY: So why don't you say what was on my mind, yes?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Suppose Apple comes to you
with a proposal for your advice.
And Apple says, you know what?
We'd like to improve the Siri experience.
The easiest part of Siri is to answer
the 20% of possible questions that 80% of the people
ask, which is like, what's the weather going
to be tomorrow or--
JOHN PALFREY: What's the score on the Red Sox game?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Exactly.
Or, I'd like to buy a book.
Maybe that won't happen.
But anyway, there's a bunch of other questions
that are long-tail questions.
What if the way that we used to route letters
that children wrote to Santa and addressed to the North Pole--
and they got sent somewhere, right?
I think they still do.
They go to people who answer the letters?
I don't know what the liability policy is.
But what if similar to that, we simply
arranged for people asking Siri to route
those two reference librarians around the country or the world
who would then answer through the Siri pipeline
and be attributed to it.
By the way, this is brought to you courtesy of a library.
And if you'd like to be more about it, blah, blah, blah.
What would your reaction be to that?
Is that like, no, no.
That's exactly the kind of corporate mediated
dehumanization that I rail against.
[LAUGHTER]
Or would it be, this is exactly the kind
of public-private partnership that would put libraries back
at the center of the meaningful questions people ask?
JOHN PALFREY: So I will answer that if I can ask my friend
Yochai to answer after I do, because he's much more
about that kind of system--
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Yochai is playing the role of Siri
in this.
JOHN PALFREY: This is the advanced cold call request
to my friend in a moment.
I was really interested-- did you see The New York Times
article about is Wikipedia in trouble
as the numbers are declining and so forth?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: They run that article about every year.
JOHN PALFREY: They do, but it was in the Sunday Review
this week.
We're seeing a little bit more serious.
It wasn't a great article, but anyway.
So here are a couple of answers.
I would be hesitant to do that particular deal with Apple
for the reason you're suggesting,
which is I worry that if what we keep doing
is creating systems that do not have
the library as the primary interface,
whether it's a public library or a research library
or a special library or a school library, I am troubled by that.
So the deal with Apple makes me nervous for a really, really
simple reason--
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: So the model is free to all, so long
as you come through our doorway.
JOHN PALFREY: Right.
Well, so long as you don't necessarily
have to come through Apple's doorway, right?
So if it were done in a truly open source way,
I could imagine that being very attractive.
If it's only through Siri or it's
creating a system that relies upon Siri
and the iPhone as opposed to an Android device or [INAUDIBLE].
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: You could imagine
it building into the DPLA as part of that stack
and have an API call to ask a librarian,
and Siri can plug in, and Google Now can plug in.
JOHN PALFREY: That would be much more interesting, for sure.
But I wouldn't do a deal-- and I just think of Apple
as the ultimate in exclusive-- somebody
has written about this too, as have you.
So yes, but only according to a structure that was truly open.
One thing that we've talked a lot about with DPLA
that's a fun idea which is like this
is the idea of the scannebago.
I don't know if people have heard this idea,
but it's called the scannebago.
I did not come up with it.
Emily Gore who works at DPLA did.
But the idea of the scannebago--
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: He's making Emily Gore
be the recipient of the trademark infringement letter.
JOHN PALFREY: No, no.
The idea of the scannebago would be to get a Winnebago
and put in the back of it a scanner
and drive it around the country and have people bring out
the materials that they have to scan them,
and then the people who were driving it
would help put in the metadata and do the scanning.
And you could imagine the documentary or the NPR piece
sort of writes itself, this notion
of driving around the country.
And you could imagine it tapping into library students, people
who just care about libraries, the sort of Wikipedia
equivalents.
You could see it also really appealing to retired librarians
as something that people could do as part of this network.
And I actually think about when reference librarians
retire, what are some of the things that
would be really fun to do?
It might be occasionally to be in this particular role, which
I think the DPLA actually could mediate
in a really interesting way.
So I think there is a version of what
has made Wikipedia so successful that we could do for libraries.
It'd be really, really fun frankly.
You think about Wikimania coming to a place
like this, as it did a bunch of years ago.
Having DPLA Fest be a place where people showed up
and actually edited metadata and answered questions.
It would be really--
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: It's like a collective Antiques Roadshow
content.
JOHN PALFREY: Yes, incredibly geeky and incredibly fun.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: But there'd be
a triage area at the beginning to see
if there's a copyright problem.
JOHN PALFREY: Well, there could be that, too.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: You'd turn away a lot of stuff.
JOHN PALFREY: That could be true, too.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: These Hardy Boys are too young.
JOHN PALFREY: [INAUDIBLE] risk with respect
to the copyright, which would be an interesting conversation.
Y
JOHN PALFREY: Are you willing to--
YOCHAI BENKLER: Jet lag from being away for awhile
notwithstanding, I'll try.
Something that came out in the exchange between the two of you
and the scannebago is let's not talk
about the corporate culture of Apple and Siri.
Let's talk about the isolation of the interaction
with the machine.
And you had said something earlier
about the human experience of the library.
You talked about the kids coming.
And as you start to talk about the scannebago
and who would come and who wouldn't come,
I'd love to hear more from you about what the human platform
element is, which is quite distinct from the DPLA
platform, is much more like that,
and is a form of a response to the Siri question that's about.
Even if it were fine from the corporate perspective,
it takes the service aspect of the library
and makes it available to isolated individuals.
And the question is, can you say a little bit more,
either from the book or your experience with how you're
thinking about building the library at your school,
about what it is that we do to support that human interaction
that libraries traditionally have provided,
and how that connects, if at all,
to this very powerful response you began with Martha's
question of, don't need a business model,
you need a story about the core of the public service
and about the core of human interaction?
Can you put a little bit more flesh on those bones?
JOHN PALFREY: So this is what happens when you hang out
with your old professors.
They answer your question with a hard question back.
I totally didn't miss that that's what just happened.
I was hoping to glean some of the brilliance of Yochai in it,
but we got it in a different form.
So thank you.
So the hard question, I think, is an important one.
So step one, from my perspective,
is the notion of humanity, which is
I actually think that if we lose the notion
of the incredible, incredible group of people who work
in libraries-- this is where the love letter starts--
and the experience of somebody walking in-- whether it's
a scholar or it's a kid or it's an old person, whatever it is--
that is a hugely important, I think,
democratic interaction that actually doesn't have
to do with the transaction.
It doesn't have to do with the transaction in the sense
of Netflix wants you to think about this movie instead
of this movie.
It has to do with people in a community
supporting one another and doing what is civic work.
So there's something that's just essential about that.
And no matter how quickly we hurtle towards the digital,
I want to be sure that that humanity is
in the mix in a really fundamental way
and that we don't lose it.
So that is really, really crucial to it.
Your question, though, also goes to what is the role
of the librarian going forward.
I would say in the tough love category
in this book is actually saying to my friends who
work in libraries and others that I actually
think the shift we have to make is to see librarians
as not necessarily working for a single institution
so much as working in the public grid in a networked way, right?
So there are about 100,000 school libraries
in the United States.
There are, call it, 15,000 public libraries
and call it another 10,000 or 15,000 other kinds
of libraries.
So we're talking about more than 100,000,
but not 150,000, institutions.
To the extent that each of these institutions
had some percentage-- if it's one person
or it's a percentage of somebody's time--
which is really devoted to this network public effort, I think,
would be vastly more powerful than as isolated institutions.
And I realize that's a shift.
That would be saying to the dean,
you're paying for people to be focused on your professor,
supporting the professor writing this great book on cooperation
or whatever it might be-- you actually
have to divert a certain percentage of that
to something that is the public good.
And by the way, it will boomerang back
in really awesome ways.
And actually, this is a bad example
because I think this dean has made exactly that enlightened
decision at Harvard Law School.
But I think if every library were seeing itself in that way,
I think that could be very powerful.
I think there are lots of librarians in this room who
actually lived that experience.
But I'm not positive that that's exactly what every institution
sees itself as doing as every town library, every school
library, and so forth.
But I think that networked approach
could be enormously powerful in ways
that we haven't yet experienced.
And I feel like it's taking some of the learning that
has made the exposure on the web so exciting
and the kinds of things that have developed from that,
and having that apply in the library
space for all these amazing principles all
this amazing material that I think
is so exciting for what could come.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: In both the book and the presentation,
you've managed to kind of capture your optimism
without being pollyannish about really
what's so valuable about the library and the community
it represents.
But you also manage to put in at least
two potential snakes in the gardens that
are really worrisome.
You did a little riff on what we'd call the first sale
doctrine that says the anchor, the platform of that library,
for hundreds of years has been the idea
that once you've got the physical artifact,
you can lend it to someone else, which also became
the anchor of the physical community
because you had to go to the library to fetch the book.
So much of just that lending is part of it.
And you pointed out that a bizarre paradox, but not
a necessary one, about digital advancements
is, congratulations, now we have a way of locking this stuff up
tight where I might have a privilege if I could figure out
how to unlock it, but I can't figure it out and unlocking it
itself may break the law.
So that seems like one snake in the garden.
I just wanted to see, if you follow the dotted line,
do we end up with more and more stuff locked up
as fewer and fewer of these get produced, because the economics
are just so simple?
You also said at the end, these might be interesting artifacts,
but they're not going to be mass-produced the way they
are even still today.
And the second snake in the garden is how you find stuff,
that previously the way to find stuff
was through categorizations done by librarians
who had professional ethics and responsibilities about how
to order stuff and truly try to make
it accessible without wondering about who paid them for product
placement on the shelf?
And now, as you say, again and again we're
going to Google, one in a handful of companies,
for all information, not just monographs.
Follow that dotted line out, and do you see any difference
from the trend that's already kind of overcome us
of not going to the library or the library system
for that kind of categorization?
Those two snakes in the garden, if that's what they are--
what do you do about them?
JOHN PALFREY: I think that is a very good summation,
and maybe that's where we should end so people
can go do something else.
But I think--
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: They're going to [INAUDIBLE] next door
while eating.
JOHN PALFREY: I'm so glad. [INAUDIBLE].
That's good, since this is a celebration of libraries.
No.
I think those two snakes in the grass,
as they went their way through, are huge risks.
We didn't talk about the entire mass of the rest of copyright
and the difficulty of doing something
like DPLA given the strictures of copyright,
so I think that's more like an elephant in the room
than a snake in the grass.
It's so obvious.
But I think these two, the notion
of the absence of a digital first sale doctrine
and the requirement that libraries increasingly
become leasers as opposed to owners-- when you combine
that with the sort of general corporatization--
this is something that goes back to the earliest
days of the internet, and what James Boyle and Yochai
and others who are writing about the enclosure movement.
I think those are things, those are lessons,
that we've learned in other parts of our scholarship
that we have to apply over here in the world of libraries,
and actually seek to bend the arc of where
the future will go, or the future that
will be history will go.
I think that's a really, really important thing for us
to stand up and say, we don't want that version
of what the future could hold.
And one of the reasons we don't want that
is because I think it will undermine support
for libraries.
And I think if we undermine support for libraries
and we don't support them in the way that we should,
I think that will undermine our democracy
and I think it will undermine scholarship, which of course,
are not unrelated also.
And so yes, I think those two snakes
making their way through the grass are worrisome.
I don't know how to meld the elephant stomping around
with snakes.
You're better at these metaphors than I am.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: No, I was just thinking of a Mark Twain
quote, that everybody always talks about the weather
but nobody ever does anything about it.
And John, you're a great example of somebody
who is both talking about the environment
that we're in, and not just remarking upon it
but building the actual structures,
the roles you've played in each of these examples-- of course,
something you wouldn't naturally trumpet.
But you have just been so crucial to all of this.
And for those reasons, it's not just what you're writing about
but what you're doing that we are
so lucky to have you in the mix, and all of the things
that you've done for us.
So if you'll allow us the uncomfortable moment
of thanking you for all your hard work.
JOHN PALFREY: You're very kind.
Thank you, everyone.
[APPLAUSE]
And thank you to the Berkman Center
and to the Harvard Law School Library for hosting.
I look forward to seeing you next door.
Thank you.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Thank you.