> Check out the link below for some excerpts from a speech the Librarian of Congress gave last week. In particular, he makes some pretty broad and sweeping generalizations about books versus computer text. Since we've got a crowd here that is literate in both media, I was wondering what people thought. [snip]
> Stephen
> Link: http://www.techlawjournal.com/educ/20000415.htm


Heh. I only got around to reading that article more carefully today, and Tech Law Journal definitely worded things to produce maximum outrage. I don't know how to comment on it squarely, because we haven't seen the full text of James Billington's address. TLJ could well have enlarged his intent out of context by their exclusion of other considerations. But, I'm going to just take the cheap and lazy approach -- assume that the TLJ did indeed report Billington's speech accurately; that he did make those ludicrous statements; and that he in effect has engaged in stonewalling the LoC's actual situation.

For if he actually said those things, then JB has shown his colours more as a petty bureaucrat rather than as the head of a great knowledge repository. He shows himself as the consummate politician, who acts using smoke and misdirection, throwing out a flimsy veil of excuses to distract the hounds from the real scent: if I'm reading between his words correctly, the real reasons for why the Library of Congress isn't digitizing its book collection on the Internet are quite banal. It probably boils down to a matter of 1. Power (control), and 2. Money.

Here's what he's not saying: In a traditional library containing physical items -- printed books and audio-visual materials -- there is a great deal of control, at each step, over the items held within the collection. A librarian is able to choose what will be, and will not be, a valid addition to the collection; she/he gets to decide how the item will be displayed and classified; and she is able to control who gains access to the material (adults or children). Conversely, the information freely available on the Internet is nowhere near as neatly defined. The Internet is a level playing field and all information finds equal weight: misinformation quoted on someone's personal website can be presented as being as factually accurate as a carefully peer-reviewed textbook, and no one may be the wiser... On the Internet, there are a whole host of 'evil complications' that JB thinks he wouldn't have to deal with when information is stored in a single copy of a book. What the LoC fears is loss of control over the actual contents of its potential digital repository.

The second reason for why the LoC isn't digitizing its books is probably more mundane: they have neither the Mandate, the manpower, nor the money to engage in such a monumental task, because all the moolah is likely going to finance the DoD instead. That's why he emphasizes the LoC is more interested in offering short easy stuff like 19th century baseball cards and "rare pamphlets," which are cheaper to digitize than "full books".

Finally, I don't know what he meant that his office shouldn't engage in "defining the bad, [because] you get onto the slippery slope of defining the bad." JB had already overgeneralized and in one fell swoop defined both the Internet and electronic media as being BAD, using terms like "mindless", "seductive", "hubris", and "amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing." Those comments are cheap and designed to frighten people -- like parents -- into agreeing with his stance, i.e. that the 'traditional' walk-in library format is superior to the presumably evil brain-sucking Internet format, which he can't finance anyway. Sheesh. Thanks a lot for sharing your fear of change with us JB.