8. Mass Library Digitisation Projects – Funding or Sustainability Models? 2 Hybrid Models – Public / Private Partnerships.
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10. Mass Library Digitisation Projects – Funding or Sustainability Models? 3 Traditional secondary publisher models. e.g. Gale, ProQuest, Adam Mathew etc.
11. Mass Library Digitisation Projects – Funding or Sustainability Models? 4 Search Engine Model. e.g. Microsoft and Google
We’ve been involved in digitisation at the library for well over 10 years. Until 5-6 years ago it was in the main digitisation of individual or small numbers of items. Turning the Pages – anyone can go onto the BL website and see this.
e.g. Research council funding
Things have now moved on – and while boutique digitisation is not dead, we are currently digitising for turning the pages a handful of treasures.
We have discussed the drivers – now I would like to turn to some of the economic models that sit in and around digitisation. This is important not only to get money in order to digitise but also to guarantee SUSTAINABILITY. “When money grows on trees” model – sometimes it does. But governmental funding are spikes of investment – the history of digitisation is littered with publicly funded projects that have gone up and gone down.
What do I mean by hybrid model – I mean bits are free and bits are not. A free or fee model.
BL – newspaper platform UK is a free market everyone has to pay elsewhere. BL – newspaper platform UK is a free market everyone has to pay elsewhere. Gallica 2 BNF and ebook publisher platform – early days. New business model – services or products off free material. V+A.
EEBO / ECCO etc. A large part of the pre 1800 corpus of material has already been digitised by ProQuest and Gale.
Important to say that I am talking about their public domain projects with N American universities and the Bodlean in Oxford. I am not talking about their in-copyright projects that is the subject to legal claim in the US. I am talking about search engines using public domain material not in copyright. Difficult to generalise about this model from the library perspective. Access project – yes? Difficult to see for some of the libraries – particularly the Google one’s what they get out of this. Whereas in the case of MSN the libraries can determine the specification, the Google libraries (Bodlean in the UK being one) cannot. It appears there are issues around long term strategy regarding this one for libraries, who have some sort of desire to move on line. Severe storage problems, some of the libraries don’t want to host this material. At a rather deep level, as an unreconstructed socialist, I worry about the privitisation of culture. But leaving these rather dark and private thoughts aside – the search engines can monetise the material – again I think there are real issues here about the ability of European companies to monetise Search – but that point aside you see a public / private partnership here as the content can be monetised through advertising and click-throughs. Libraries could monetise in some SMALL way through POD. But I think interestingly, leaving aside the questionable ability of Europeans to monetise search, I think there is another new business model that we could see developing. See Elsevier for example with their vertical search engine “scirrus” stepping into these waters.
Costs dropped – but still a way to go. Only BL doing fold outs, no one doing manuscript, no OCRing for most languages.
No accident that many of the projects are out of copyright.
Based on an ALA study that one permission takes 12 years we came up with these statistics. This is a huge disincentive – so if libraries are to go into the black hole of the 20 th century some sort of streamlined rights clearance process is required. Clearly there is a role for collective licensing structures like RROs for this. Rights clearance is a really large issue. And some way through this must be found if we are to find a way through and get more and more material online – which is what governments and Brussels want.
Aaah yes. Well I think this is code for the internet I think and the changes that are being wrought around us. None of us are immune to this. In the library world they talk about libraries becoming “the museum of the book”. I think many of the Google libraries seem to be ensuring this is happening! If I was to look at the publishing industry I would say that clearly the digital revolution is changing the traditional structures and norms that have grown up since the advent of mass publishing in the middle of the 19 th century. The traditional book industry and the norms that exist as reflected in copyright law are based upon a system of scarcity and high distribution costs. This is not the case anymore in the internet age. For me to become a web-based publisher the cost of market entry for me are zero – or incidental to my monthly broadband cost. The number of authors and publishers has absolutely exploded – the number of rights holders and from the perspective of an RRO those to represent have potentially gone through the roof. We have gone from a very elitist group of rights holders in the past, who were usually well educated and defined themselves often as an author or a researcher to the anithesis of this. We no have the “INCIDENTAL RIGHTS HOLDER”. This clearly has to affect how copyright, collective licensing and access to knowledge is thought about. Internet theorists tell us that user generated, collaboratively produced content, like wikipedia etc are leading to the growth of new business models. Of course the publishing models we have known and loved for the last 100 years can’t be thrown out like the baby with the bathwater as we say in the UK. However new thinking, new Intellectual property rights structures and new business models that reflect the open and collaborative nature of the web are of course going to come to the fore. In some small way I think that mass digitisation is one area where we see all the conflicts, uncertainties and potentials, around access to knowledge in the internet era being highlighted. I have here highlighted a number of things that I believe are needed to facilitate the political end game of putting european culture online. They are all vital, no one more than any other, but perhaps a first amongst equals is this last slide. New thinking to cut a way through the swathe of issues to the benefit of industry and citizen alike is surely needed.
