Above: Newnham College Library, via Spectacular Library.
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It’s interesting to me that the DPLA’s model is so vague. Sure, it’d be awesome to have every book uploaded online in theory—tens of millions of books at your fingertips, anywhere, anytime—but what then? Are people actually reading the digital tomes already available on Google Book Search? I’m not. I know folks read the public domain titles on their e-readers, but e-readers and iPads are mostly owned by people that can already afford access to the books they download. That’s not really the key demographic the rhetoric surrounding this project would have you believe it’s designed to aid.Google Book Search quite useful as a reference tool, say, when you want to pull out a quote out of Moby Dick. But might increasing the ease by which we can snag literary information diminish the import of the knowledge contained in these volumes? Everyone already complains the internet is making us dumber with everything else. So might this project, whose aim is to offer free access to the library of the world to anyone with an internet connection, mostly end up pleasing scholars, journalists, and students with book reports due the next day? I don’t know.The point is, it seems like relatively little consideration is going into how the books will ultimately be experienced or what the delivery system will look like. This wasn’t as much of a concern for Google, which treated texts as more searchable material for its mighty algorithm. But both efforts can seem rather crusade-like; the quest itself—free knowledge for all!—is paramount, and the question of what to do with all that knowledge secondary. A comprehensive online digital library would be a beautiful, awe-inspiring thing—and perhaps if we managed to better demonstrate how we’d use it, some of the opposition would ease away.The controversy over nomenclature points to a deeper problem confronting the nascent online library: its inability to define itself. The DPLA remains a mystery in many ways. No one knows precisely how it will operate or even what it will be. Some of the vagueness is deliberate. When the Berkman Center launched the initiative, it wanted major decisions to be made in a collaborative and inclusive manner, avoiding top-down decrees that might alienate any of its many constituencies. But according to current DPLA officials and others involved in the project, the 17 members of the steering committee also have fundamental disagreements about the library’s mission and scope. Many important aspects of the effort remain, in Palfrey’s words, “to be determined.”