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Thomas Mann
Reference Librarian
Humanities and Social Sciences Division
Library of Congress

Given the time constraint, I'm going to concentrate on only one topic: What is the proper relationship of real libraries to the Information Superhighway? If we do not define that relationship correctly, then everything else we do is going to be off the track. To get into this, I'm going to have to do some heavy-duty philosophizing about human nature; this will be tedious, but, mercifully, brief. I'm also going to have to talk about copyright. We've all read too many articles in the library literature, and heard too many talks, that conclude by saying, "copyright needs to be studied further," or "copyright problems still need to be worked out." If we're going to talk about reference service and digital libraries, it just won't do to keep deferring this issue. There are enough elements in place right now that solid guidelines for planning can be discovered.

But before I get into that, I first want to protest the casual assumption that this is a "digital age" to begin with. We need to stop throwing that term around so loosely. According to the last couple years of the Bowker Annual, the book title output for the United States alone was 46,743 in 1990; 51,863 in 1994; and 62,039 in 1995. Over six years, then, the total book production in the United States alone has increased from 46,000 titles to 62,000--an increase of 33%.

The number of serials in paper format is also increasing. The 1992-93 edition of Ulrich's directory lists 140,000 titles; the 1998 lists 156,000. (According to the same source, fewer than 8% of these have electronic equivalents or are electronic to begin with.)

Virtually none of this printed material is freely available in cyberspace. If people want free access to the vast bulk of this huge and growing print production they still have to come inside real libraries--and by "free" access I mean what most readers mean: without individual admission fees or direct charges at the point of use.

So, obviously, we are living in a mixed paper and digital age; and the ever increasing mass of books and serials still needs to be collected somewhere and made freely available. Across the board, commercially-published books and serials have a much higher claim to the designation "knowledge records" than self-mounted Web sites on the Internet--not that there aren't tens of thousands of wonderful sites on the Web. All of this has a direct bearing on reference service in the real world--whatever term we use to designate that world. I think we first have to grasp why the bulk of reference service cannot be provided in a virtual library environment without radically dumbing down the whole idea of what constitutes research, scholarship--and reference service. (Most of what I'm going to say will apply primarily to research libraries and public libraries--not so much to special libraries, which are a breed apart and which do not offer an acceptable model for research and public libraries to imitate.)

Why is it that most books and journals cannot be digitized?

Primarily because of copyright realities. Many digital library enthusiasts regard copyright protection as a "problem" that will be "solved" in the online environment--and it will be "solved" at "summit" meetings of publishers, authors' groups, government representatives, and librarians. And librarians will call the shots at these meetings. (Right!) Well, there have been any number of summit meetings already, and the bottom line, that they never get around, is that copyright is not the problem. Piracy is the problem. Copyright is the solution. That fundamental relationship has already been "worked out," and it will not go away. The concept of copyright itself is meaningless if it does not entail some very real restrictions--and that, too, has already been "worked out." Restrictions are not going to vanish--nor can they realistically be considered "problems" capable of being circumvented by technological devices or by clever discoveries of legal loopholes.

Why not? It's because we're talking about something that is abiding within human nature itself. History and political philosophy, especially after the events in Eastern Europe of 1989, may be important guides to library and information science here. These other disciplines tell us that large-scale enterprises simply don't work out in the long run when they are based on the assumption that human beings will voluntarily forego the advantages of private property (including intellectual property), and that they will, instead, happily contribute their work product, freely, to a larger collective good. Human beings seem especially predisposed not to abide by such selfless goals, in the long run, when they are given the perception of alternative economic arrangements, and the freedom to pursue them.

In other words, the "digital age" faith that "copyright problems" will be "worked out" so that everybody has "free" access to "everything" in "virtual libraries" is based on essentially unworkable Marxist assumptions about human nature. Marx thought that if private property were abolished, then there would indeed be a change in human nature itself--and that the new citizens, no longer alienated by class distinctions of haves and have-nots created by property ownership, would voluntarily contribute their work products to the collective good. Allocations of resources would be made fairly and equitably among all people based on the selfless benevolence of citizens rather than through market mechanisms of supply and demand.

The verdict of history is in, however: This is not an assumption about human nature that we can rely on.

I am not saying there is an alternative "capitalist" view of human nature; there isn't. Capitalism can be reconciled with several different views of human nature that are not reconcilable among themselves--Freudian, Existentialist, or Christian views, for example. Perhaps I can clarify the overall view of human nature that I think is most "bankable on" by saying it's the one underlying The Federalist Papers and the Constitution of the United States. Instead of assuming the selfless benevolence of human beings as the operating mechanism of a free society, the Founders of this country assumed the opposite. They assumed that citizens needed to be protected from the inevitable infringements of other citizens. And so they developed an elaborate mechanism of divided representation, separation of powers, and checks and balances, that would be sustained precisely by the persistence of individual and selfish interests competing with each other. As Federalist 51 notes, "What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

What does this mean for librarians in a "digital age"? I'd say that "if men and women were angels, no copyright protection would be necessary--there would be no piracy, no sense of 'infringement' to begin with, and no perception of 'unfair' use." But the protection is necessary because people do recognize infringement and unfair use when they see it; and these perceptions cannot be wished away or circumvented by legal loopholes. If we librarians assume the opposite, that people will selflessly contribute their private property to the Internet, for the good of all, and that "everything" will be freely available to everyone in cyberspace, then our plans for the future are built on a foundation of sand. We cannot assume that some legal loophole will be found enabling intellectual property to be socialized so that everyone will have free and equal access to everything on the Internet. Human nature itself will have to change before that happens; and that's why I say copyright "problems" cannot possibly be worked out in cyberspace.

Notice, however, I'm specifying that the conflicting interests of intellectual property, on the one hand, and of free and equal access to information, on the other, cannot be solved in cyberspace. By "cyberspace"--or, alternatively, the "Information Superhighway" (I'm using these terms interchangeably)--I mean those resources of the Internet and the Web that are freely available to anyone who can secure basic access to the system to begin with; within the larger electronic world that includes both copyrighted and public sites, cyberspace is the comparatively bigger portion that is accessible to terminals anywhere on earth without direct point-of-use access charges.

I said that the problems of intellectual property and free access will not be solved in this world because I think there is a solution to these problems if we simply step outside cyberspace, rather than try vainly to force everything into cyberspace. But the configurations of that outside world are so obvious that apparently we're too close to see them. And it doesn't help that our profession is wearing "digital age" blinders that prevent us from recognizing the permanent importance of real libraries with printed books and serials--and site-licensed electronic resources.

Those who maintain that copyright will disappear in the "digital age" are overlooking the obvious solution that publishers and authors are already endorsing on a wholesale basis, namely, that those people who wish to maintain hassle-free control of their intellectual property will simply avoid putting it on the Information Superhighway in the first place, and confine publication to paper formats. We should not need $400-an-hour lawyers to point out this obvious fact; all we need to do is simply remove our own self-imposed "digital age" blinders.

Given that copyright inevitably entails restrictions, there are only two kinds of restrictions that are possible in the electronic world: either you restrict what is made available to begin with--mounting only copyright free texts that are in the public domain. Or, if you do mount copyrighted texts on the worldwide network--and wish to profit from them--then you must restrict who has access. This means that only people who can pay high subscription costs for passwords, or who can use credit cards at the point of use, will be able to get into the most desirable, copyrighted parts of the "virtual library." (If you do mount copyrighted texts without encryption or access restricted via passwords, then, realistically, you simply no longer have copyright protection.) The obvious example is that right now there are more than a thousand journals that are full-text searchable in NEXIS--but how many people can afford to pay the highly restrictive access fees, which are about $4.00 per minute if you search the whole thing?

There are two middle grounds in the electronic world; the first lies in large organizations subsidizing costs for their members--some law schools, for example, subsidize access to LEXIS for their faculty and students. But membership in such a group, with restricted passwords, is actually just another form of the who restriction. Can access be similarly subsidized for the whole country so that everybody has equal access to all information electronically--both public domain and copyrighted information? Think what this actually means: it's tantamount to the complete socialization of intellectual property. In the United States.

This simply cannot happen.

(Note that I am not precluding the possibility of some form of subsidized access, for educational institutions, to the basic Internet system; and in saying "basic" I mean the parts of the Internet that are freely available to everyone who gets in. But subsidizing initial access to the basic system is not the same as subsidizing access to its thousands of copyrighted sites that have who restrictions on access.)

The second middle ground in the electronic world is to restrict access to some databases to a limited geographic area--that is, to a certain number of terminals available only in designated locales. Individual passwords are not needed for access to these sources, and anyone who goes to those few terminals can indeed have free access to whatever is on them. But since the physical location of the designated terminals is severely restricted, these site-licensed electronic resources are, in a very real sense, not part of cyberspace--they are not on the "Information Superhighway" to begin with--that is, they are not accessible from anywhere at anytime by anyone. You have to be inside a real library with walls in order to use them. But in "digital age" thinking, having to go inside a real library with walls, during limited hours of opening, is the very antithesis of being able to tap into a "virtual library" from anywhere, at any time.

The major implication here is that we have to go outside the Information Superhighway--outside the box of cyberspace--in order to escape its inevitable what and who restrictions--but this is precisely what can be done in real libraries. And physical libraries-with-walls can do much more than offer free access to site-licensed electronic resources. They can offer free access to the vast bulk of humanity's memory contained in books and journals--a memory that is not on the Information Superhighway to begin with. In real libraries, the full texts of every book and every journal in their collections can be freely read by anyone who comes in the door--and real libraries are not bound to offer only public-domain material, to restrict who can come in, or to charge patrons any direct (and prohibitive) point-of-use costs for reading anything at all in their print holdings or their site-licensed electronic resources.

If we librarians want to promote the free access to the knowledge records of the world, we have to be consciously aware that overcoming the what and who restrictions of digital libraries necessarily entails a where limitation--that is, a restriction to a library place that actually has walls. This particular limitation, however, is mitigated by the lending practices of most real libraries--much of their material can be loaned or checked out for use elsewhere, and in those other locations can be used at any time of the day or night. And the where limitation is also mitigated by the fact that there are so many real libraries and that they are so geographically dispersed in so many communities. The real "solution" to "problems" of free access to copyrighted material already exists: It is to be found in the widespread geographic dispersal of real libraries with walls, and not on the Internet.

Our society and our culture need a mechanism whereby everyone can indeed have free access to the intellectual work of everyone else in a way that nonetheless protects property rights by imposing a restriction. Real libraries--not virtual libraries, but real libraries--with their inherent where limitation, constitute the best and, indeed, the only mechanism we have for providing this free access. Although many digitally infatuated theorists criticize real libraries on precisely this point--that they restrict access to only those people who can come to a certain place--the "library without walls" that is proposed as the alternative is itself a massive tradeoff: This "digital age" proposal naively and routinely overlooks the fact that as soon as you eliminate the localized walls, you inevitably create other enormous restrictions of what and who.

What this means is that the where restriction that is viewed by the cyberprophets as the weakness of real libraries is, in fact, precisely the major strength of real libraries. Without this geographic restriction on access, there is a real danger that, in cyberspace, much less of the most substantive knowledge records of humanity will be freely available to citizens and researchers--for example, those 60,000 books and 150,000 serials that are now being printed on paper every year.

In terms of reference service, then, if we re-prioritize our focus to concentrate on the non-localized clientele of the Internet as more important than those readers who can come into real reading rooms, there is a real danger: It is that of radically dumbing down reference service to the point that we seek to steer researchers not to the best sources available for their inquiries, but rather to only those sites that they can tap into freely on the Internet. There is already a strong tendency among students in particular to limit their research to only Internet sources--to the detriment of both their critical thinking and everyone's future culture. I suggest that a major goal of reference service in the present age is to correct rather than to exacerbate this very serious problem. To correct it, we need to emphasize the importance of real libraries primarily as destinations in themselves--not primarily as on-ramps to the Information Superhighway, and not primarily as content-providers of full-text collections for the Internet. Even if we do assert the importance of real libraries as places, the problem is not solved (and is in fact exacerbated) by promoting them as places for meeting rooms, cultural programs, and coffee bars--that kind of promotion shifts the primary emphasis away from acquiring, cataloging, providing reference service for, and preserving real collections that do not have massive what and who restrictions on them. If we justify the continued maintenance of library buildings as places only, or even primarily, in terms of meeting rooms and coffee bars--or in terms suggesting that our primary function is to provide places where people can get help with the Internet--then we are tacitly agreeing, without a shot being fired, to the concealed proposition that real collections with where limitations are in fact no longer of central importance. When our best defense of real libraries implies that their primary function nowadays is to provide services other than access to real collections onsite, then our "defense" plays directly into the hands of budget cutters who maintain that real collections are indeed obsolete in a "digital age."

Given the human nature we actually have, we can never entirely eliminate restrictions on access to intellectual property. We have to settle for tradeoffs among them. But the geographic restriction on access to our culture's most substantive knowledge records is a tradeoff that libraries can do more than just live with; we can thrive on it. We first need, however, to cure ourselves of the idiotic and suicidal notion that has taken hold of the library profession's soul in the last decade, that providing service within walls is our primary weakness when in fact it is precisely our primary strength. This fundamental, rock-bottom misperception of reality--this habitual predisposition in our profession to look at our problems through the wrong end of the telescope to begin with--is tainting everything we librarians do. When we always frame our own questions and set up our own conference agendas automatically to include phrases like "in a digital age" or "in virtual libraries," then right off the bat we are boxing ourselves into a universe of options that is too limited; and we are thereby precluding the very possibility of finding actual solutions to our most pressing problems in the real world. If we continue to portray the provision of service within walls as something to apologize for, to be embarrassed about, and to "get beyond," then we will be killing not just our own profession, but also our culture that depends on the free access to substantive knowledge records that can be provided only by real libraries with where restrictions. And by "substantive" knowledge records I mean not just the increasing avalanche of printed books and journals that have gone through the important filtering processes of publication and selection--I mean also the increasing variety of site-licensed electronic resources that cannot be tapped into from anywhere, at anytime, by anyone out in cyberspace. This being the reality of the information world, in an age of mixed print and digital media, it follows that--and I realize it's not "sexy" to say this--the primary focus of reference service must be on the needs of researchers who come within the walls of real libraries.

Library of Congress Links:

• Reference Service in a Digital Age Home Page
• Research and Reference Home Page
• Library of Congress Home Page

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Library of Congress

Comments and Questions: digiref@loc.gov (10/20/98)