Quantcast
Channel: The Desk Set » open access
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Ghosts in the Library

0
0

When I think about big ideas, about the kind of ideas that feel not only important but somehow beautiful just in their existence, I often come back to the ghost of Bas Jan Ader. Ader’s entire oeuvre embodies a kind of searching, a haunting Romantic conceptualism, but it is his final project, “In Search of the Miraculous” that comes to mind in these moments. It was a performance, one that involved an attempt at a single-handed east-west crossing of the Atlantic, and one that ended in disappearance at sea. We go in search of the miraculous and perhaps we don’t come back.

Back in December of 2010, around the time I was doing the post-day-job night shift in library school and became convinced that I was seeing a ghost on the swing sets of McGolrick Park in Greenpoint, I read an article by Robert Darnton, University Librarian and Professor at Harvard, called The Library: Three Jeremiads in the New York Review of Books. I was writing about the impending closure of the Warburg Institute’s library in London for one of my classes and thinking a lot about romantic conceptions of the library-as-place. The Warburg itself seemed haunted by the memory of Aby Warburg, his tragic personal history of repeated institutionalization and his characteristically romantic writings on memory, history and art. In the wake of this controversy around a relatively small special library, academics were publicly lamenting the plight of libraries everywhere, as non-STEM education budgets were being slashed across the country (and the globe). There was almost this sense of the library as a dying breed, libraries (like physical, living bodies) were “becoming extinct.” Of course, this is an old argument and we can follow this fraying thread forward to the ongoing controversy surrounding the New York Public Library’s research materials. But what thrilled me about Darnton’s proposal was that, yes, it was utopian but it wasn’t entirely nostalgic. Darnton was not waxing poetic about dusty tomes and card catalogs, he was proposing a public library enterprise of a Google-ian scale. He argued that we cannot rely on Google to digitize and preserve content free-of-charge to the general public because, as a corporation, Google’s primary responsibility is to its share-holders (and besides there was that whole drama with the Author’s Guild). Instead, he claimed, we needed to create a massive public digital library. And so the Digital Public Library of America, which launches today, was born. At the time I remember thinking that the dream of an online public library seemed: a.) impossible, b.) romantic, and c.) politically radical.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Timeless_Books.jpg

The Digital Public Library of American (DPLA) relies on open access to cultural heritage information — images, text, video, etc. — online. I’ve written elsewhere about the challenges that face open access in fields outside of the hard sciences.  These are very real problems, including copyright restrictions on primary source material as well as a very different culture and economic model within academic publishing outside of the sciences. (Most humanities research is self- and not government-funded, which makes the incentive to make things openly accessible much smaller.) To ignore these problems is to simplify the issue but despite these restrictions, I think Gary Hall‘s assertion that open access should be politico-ethical issue for scholars (and librarians!) outside of the sciences is important to take into consideration. I particularly like his description of the state of discourse around media as one that is plagued by a “dialectical ghost.” Hall argues that most scholars on new media and open access tend to fall into two camps: technophiles or technophobes. While we should be cautious of web utopianism, there is no doubt that the internet has changed and continues to change the way we think, interact, live. So, yes, I think it is a politically radical idea to challenge Google’s hegemony on internet searching, on access to cultural information. Yes, I think it is radical to propose large-scale public-funded projects and follow through with them. And, yes, I think it touches upon something missing from a lot of social policy in this country, namely a belief in public education, a belief that everyone has the right to access resources. As the digital divide diminishes, this battle will continue to be fought online.

And yet I realize that both this project and my reading of it are still haunted by some romantic ideals of the Library. I buoy my arguments up with politics and new media discourse, and yet I still imagine a vast space of information, the ghost of Alexandria, perhaps? Darnton even admits to an Enlightenment utopianism in this project, an ideal of a data-driven library of Alexandria, a vast network of hubs that might enlighten us all. Furthermore, in this past year, with the tragic death of Aaron Swartz we have survived the open access movement’s first martyr, at least in the media’s eyes. With suicide, martyrdom, and with martyrdom, mythology.  And, so, I find myself back with Bas Jan Ader; with these big ideas that are still never too big to fail, that still perhaps come with a price. And, yet, there’s hope, right? We can hope that the library is not yet a ghost, that the open access movement and projects like the Digital Public Library of America represent some shifting future for the library. Whether it succeeds or not, the idea of the DPLA is both beautiful and important. And that’s a start.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images