Speech by Jon Madsen, Library Director of Bornholm, Denmark.
Across borders, librarians share a common interest, and that is content and how it can be brought to the citizen. Recently how, or if, we can access the accumulated knowledge of the past and present has become a topic of public debate. The initiative of Google has to a large extent put the spotlight on what is at stake. The Internet is increasingly the information source privileged above all other. Can it also be used to make Europe´s uniquely valuable cultural heritage more visible and accessible?
There is an emerging political will to make this happen. Last year we have seen the European Commission´s intentions to reinforce actions at a European level. Mr. Barroso called for the Heads of State to support him in the European Commission´s approach to safeguarding and adding value to Europe´s cultural heritage, the mirror of our cultural diversity. But it is not going to happen automatically. It will require a real commitment of all involved, not least from the national libraries.
The stakes are high, from a social, cultural and economic point of view. Libraries play a fundamental role in our society. We are the collectors and stewards of our heritage; we are organisers of the knowledge in the books we collect - adding value by cataloguing, classifying and describing them; and, as public institutions, we assure equality of access for all citizens. We take the knowledge of the past and present, and lay it down for the future.
Europe´s libraries and archives contain a wealth of material representing the richness of Europe´s history, acquired over the centuries. These materials cover a range of forms - books, newspapers, films, photographs and maps. By bringing it online, we make it easier for citizens to appreciate their own culture as well as our common European history. Library collections in the different countries represent their cultural identities. Language is at the heart of these identities. The internet provides an incredible opportunity to circulate our heritage to advantage and to make it known on a world scale - if the language barriers can be bridged.
Economically, cultural industries and cultural heritage are major sectors of activity. For example, according to statistics, European libraries employed nearly 337.000 staff 5 years ago and had 138 million registered users. This is almost one third of the entire EU population. This shows the social impact libraries have.
Once digitised, content from cultural institutions can be an important economic force - as a source of material to be re-used for added-value services and products in sectors such as tourism and education. It can also be important as a driver of networked traffic: books lead to booksellers, to libraries, to museums, to information about places, and back to other books.
"i2010" - the European strategy
Let us now look at the issue of digital libraries within the wider policy for the information society and media. Viviane Reding, the member of the European Commission responsible for Information Society and Media, has recently launched an initiative aimed at re-invigorating the contribution of information and communication technologies to the Lisbon priorities of economic growth and the creation of more and better jobs. The initiative is called "i2010". It provides a framework to address the main challenges facing the information society and media sectors in the next 5 years. "i2010" is built on 3 pillars:
We must recognise that there are many views of what is a digital library. Is it an electronic library? A digitised collection? A scientific repository of softwares and models? A publisher´s collection? Or is it the world wide web itself? What then should be the European digital library? I see it as a network of many digital libraries, in different institutions, all across Europe.
These libraries will give the citizen online access to books, to local historical records, to archive films and museum objects - and provide services so they can use them. If you like, we are creating a virtual temple where the libraries are the pillars and Europe supports the structures that hold them together. In other words, our added-value is in promoting and sharing the vision, and in helping realise it. This means cooperating to avoid duplication, cooperating in networking and standards and cooperating in developing common and more cost-effective solutions. Realising these digital libraries at a European level implies work on three main problems:
Progress in all three of these areas - online accessibility, digitisation and digital preservation - means tackling a range of challenges. These are economic, legal, organisational and technical in nature.
Digitisation is an expensive, labour-intensive, industrial process. Firstly, we are potentially dealing with huge volumes of materials, even if we are selective about what to digitise. To take the books alone, in the 25 member states of the EU there were more than 2.5 million titles in the libraries 5 years ago, with many of the large national and research libraries having collections in the tens of millions. Similarly, the long term costs of digital preservation are unknown.
Legal barriers
Legal questions revolve around copyright, as the recent problems of the Google library project show. To digitise is to make a copy. This may be problematic under current copyright law. There is an exception for public libraries and archives in the copyright directive, but this exception has been implemented in different ways in the member states. Copyright conditions are most relevant for online availability. Having a digital or digitised copy does not automatically mean you can disseminate it to the public. Under current EU law and international agreements, digitised material can only be made accessible online if it is in the public domain or with the explicit consent of the rights´ holders. Where the author has been dead for more than 70 years, works are in the public domain - but even this criterion is not clear-cut and contains traps. Re-prints can include a new preface, which means volume 1 can still be covered by copyright but volumes 2-4 can be copyright-free. As a result, the model of lending physical books, for centuries a core function of libraries, cannot simply be transposed to the digital environment. In a time where the library could, in principle, come to the citizen, the citizen still has to come to the library. An online library offering works other than those in the public domain will need agreements on a case-by-case basis with the rights´ holders or substantial change in the copyright legislation.
There is an obvious risk here: the risk that we create a "black hole of the 20th century" in the digital collection of knowledge. This black hole will arise unless we find cost-effective and manageable solutions for clearing rights so that copyrighted materials can be digitised and made available online. This is particularly striking in one thinks of audio visual heritage, which is almost exclusively 20th century, and which provides unique evidence of the cultural and historical events of our time.
This scale of the economic challenge for digitisation requires cooperation at a European level in order to optimise the resources that are available. This is a big organisational challenge: New ways of working together are necessary to make digitisation happen. Effective digitisation efforts on such a scale cannot depend on the public purse alone. Telecom Italia is supporting the digitisation of a library in Milano. In Spain, Telefonica has partnered the Biblioteca Nacional and the Bibliotekca de Catalunya in digitising catalogues and documents. More public-private partnerships are needed to digitise and exploit the resources in our cultural organisations. And, of course, close collaboration with publishers and other rights´ holders is necessary to find new models for bringing copyrighted material online. Furthermore, investments in digitisation must be accompanied by organisational changes within the institutions concerned. New types of skills are necessary to deal with the technological tools, together with the extensive expertise that already exists within the institutions. For libraries, this means tackling training and re-skilling as well as recruiting staff with the new skill-sets.
As for the technical challenges, we need to improve the tools for the digitisation and indexing of texts, particularly for non-English languages and for old materials. Progress with the technological tools can contribute to reducing costs and to increasing efficiency of digitisation. To do this, we need to combine the specialist knowledge in the member states with the different stakeholder communities - enterprises, libraries and archives, universities and research organisations. Interdisciplinary cooperation in real centres of competence can help us advance the technologies for digitisation in Europe. What the users want from digital libraries are easy-to-find materials that provide the most precise and complete answers to their queries, without having to navigate through pages of results of information on screen. This requires more sophisticated and automatic indexing of the resources that will be in our future digital libraries - audio, visual and 3D constructions as well as text.
Libraries on the European agenda
Although the challenges are formidable, they are not new and we are not starting from scratch. In all member states, initiatives exist to bring the national cultural heritage online, but the intensity and focus of effort may vary. The internet is creating a huge jigsaw of different services, collections and resources.
Even within countries, the picture is fragmented and there are different initiatives for joining up the pieces. In Denmark we have our Digital Electronic Research Library; the United Kingdom is developing the framework for a research libraries network. France has taken the recent initiative to set up a multi-stakeholder steering committee to report on strategies for a European digital library. These initiatives have the national libraries as key partners, but they reveal the wide variety of other stakeholders involved, from research, technology and industry, and from the public and private sectors. The recent initiative of France to set up a steering committee to report on realising a European digital library has given a new impetus, bringing together the stakeholders from different sectors to address the problems. In the future, this cooperation needs to be extended to multiple levels - between the member states, between the libraries, but also between the public and private sectors.
Libraries have also worked at a European level to make their systems more interoperable so that users can search their catalogues collectively, rather than on at a time. The most recent example is the launch of TEL (The European Library) last year. TEL provides users for the first time with a single point of access to the catalogues and some of the digitised treasures of those eleven libraries who are taking part in it.
The Commission is supposed to take action on a number of fronts - political, strategic and technical. If we want to accelerate the work towards a European digital library, we need a flagship initiative. In fact, the Commission has published a memorandum already. It has been brought to the attention of the European Parliament and of the Council, and it was discussed at the Culture Council in November last year. This should create a commitment to tackling the problems at a political level.
This result should be followed by a consultation exercise with the different stakeholders, with questions on key issues such as copyrights, for future legislative and other actions. Librarians should contribute collectively to this and encourage our colleagues in other countries to do the same. The results of this can be used as an input to a Recommendation on digitisation and digital preservation. And in this way, libraries have finally made their way into the European agenda.
This is not done free of charge. From now on and until 2008, 60 million Euros are available for access to digital cultural content within the "eContentplus" programme. Its aims are to make it easier to discover cultural resources, and to make a critical mass of existing cultural resources available for re-use, multi-lingually and across borders. The programme does not finance digitisation itself, but it will support the networking of national collections that are already digitised.
Libraries face real challenges in coping with the transition to the digital age. We do not want to become the dinosaurs of the future, so we have to adapt, attract new and young users, and we also have to develop new business models. This implies profound changes in our organisations, in our skills - and sometimes also in our attitude. We have considerable strengths in the libraries throughout Europe, so let us exploit them. We have uniquely valuable sources of our cultural heritage. Now close your eyes and imagine the huge potential of adding an automatic translation programme to this digitisation of the written heritage of the EU member states. The technology is there already - and if you can dream it, you can do it.
