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The mechanics of a universal library are simple. The tricky part: harnessing the free labor.
It's a bad day in the stacks.
I go three for seven: three books found, one that should be there but isn't, one recorded lost, and one checked out that will have to be recalled. The seventh is the one I really want: QB54.C661. There's no copy in UC Berkeley's main Doe Library stacks - it's shelved in the Math Library. The Math copy is not where it's supposed to be, but the catalog claims there are two copies on the shelves in Moffitt. Then time's up. It will be 64 hours before I get another crack at tracking down Appendix D of Carl Sagan, ed., Communication With Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
And that's after two hours doing very low grade work: looking up call numbers, wandering down corridors, waiting for the crowds to clear out between the compact movable stacks so I can get at the shelves without crushing grad students in the next aisle. Knowledge revolution, indeed.
So why can't I just call up the text on my computer screen? Where is my universal online library?
In 1971, Michael Hart asked himself the same question, and started Project Gutenberg with the goal of making every single text ever written freely accessible. From a worldwide cost-benefit standpoint, Project Gutenberg is a no-brainer. Sure, it'll cost $750 million in volunteer time (if the typists are in the United States - just $50 million if they're in India), but some 1 million book titles could be called up anytime anywhere from anything with an Internet connection. We're talking 10 cents per person, or less, to create the universal online library. Click - whatever you want to read next is there. The hard task is mobilizing the resources to build it.
In the past there have been three means of setting large collective projects in motion. Governments have commanded people to work. Markets have used carrots rather than sticks by offering the possibility of profit. And philanthropists have spent their wealth in places where governments and markets have failed. More recently, we have seen the emergence of a fourth way: open source. A charismatic and technically adept organizer can mobilize, say, 5 percent of the work time of each of thousands of contributors motivated solely by the intangible rewards of solving a problem. The result can be popular, elegant, and groundbreaking. Like Linux.
Linus Torvalds' open source operating system project got its start two decades after Michael Hart's open source library project, but has long since surpassed it. Linux scales well and flourishes because contributors eat up the intellectual problems of programming and gain status by pitching in. Of course, Bill Gates' closed source software project, which postdates Project Gutenberg by only four years, also scales well and flourishes, because the overwhelming majority of users would rather pay for the reliability of the leading brand.
Project Gutenberg, however, has failed to achieve any form of critical mass. It's not a high priority for governments. It hasn't attracted large donations from foundations. Since the whole point is to create a free universal online library, it won't be driven by markets. And as an open source project, the positive-feedback loops are not strong enough. The work is time-consuming and boring.
Thus Project Gutenberg has inched ahead at a snail's pace. In its 32nd year of existence, the collection has only 6,267 etexts. Now, Gutenberg is not the only source of freely or cheaply available electronic texts. I can see pieces of the universal online library taking shape in the JSTOR journal-articles archive and Allison Druin and Benjamin Bederson's International Children's Digital Library, which is being built in the philanthropist mode. But much of what exists elsewhere is far from free. Or easily accessible. And most texts still aren't digitized. So I continue to spend large parts of my waking life wandering around the bleeping stacks looking for things that aren't there.
Technology isn't the problem. The past half-century has seen vast improvements in scanning, storage, search, and data transmission. But we still have only a crude set of tools for harnessing the public spirit on a mass scale.
We can do it, however, with a hybrid solution. Get government to play a key role, from limiting copyright to sponsoring projects. Build an open source core around which profit opportunities emerge, and fill in the holes with acts of philanthropy. This type of collective effort could produce public projects that don't rely on the involuntary servitude of humble researchers. (Ahem.)
So here's a shout-out to blogger Michael McNeil, who (with the kind permission of its author) has added Appendix D to our nascent universal online library. Freeman Dyson's manifesto-commentary on J. D. Bernal's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil is finally at my fingertips, no thanks to call number QB54.C661. Thank impearls.blogspot.com/2002_11_10_impearls_archive.html #84429829.
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