TeleRead for years has pushed for a distributed national digital library system managed day to day by many librarians in many locations–as opposed to a Washington or New York elite–even if certain administrative functions could be centralized and national resources could be used and adapted at the local level.
Meanwhile, in certain other media and technological areas, the decentralizational movement is gaining strength. Check out David Weinberg’s recent essay Why Open Spectrum Matters The End of the Broadcast Nation–the topic of a recent post from Dan Gillmor.
In the essay, Weinberg lays out the three big lessons of the Internet, and they could well apply to library systems, too:
“(a) Open standards work. Rather than building a network that connects A to B to C by touching copper to copper, the creators of the Internet built a network by establishing standards for how information is to be moved. It is because the Internet was not built as a thing that it has been able to bring the world many orders of magnitude more bandwidth than any previous network. Our current policy, however, treats spectrum as if it were a physical thing to be carved up. By focusing on open standards rather than on spectrum-as-thing, the medium can become far more efficient and offer far greater capacity.
“(b) Decentralization works. Keep the architecture clean and simple. Put the ‘smarts’ in the devices communicating across the network rather than in centralized computers. In fact, central control and regulation would have kept the Internet from becoming the force that it has.
“(c) Lowering the cost of access and connection unleashes innovation beyond any reasonable expectation.”
Thoughts for library and publishing people to ponder? Especially on issues such as grassroots file-sharing? TeleRead would spread the smarts and the goodies around, so that even individual users could even store books permanently on their own machines and share them, whenever they wanted–with privacy-respecting tracking mechanisms in place to provide for payments to content-providers from a national digital library fund or from the users themselves. Thousand and thousands of copyrighted works–those covered by the fund–could be free to users without cheating the writers and publishers or impeding the ability of schoolchildren and others to share the whole books.
Just as the radio establishment is resisting, and will resist, the new technology, many in the library and publishing fields will resist the TeleRead approach despite its financial potential. So be it. But eventually, technology will win out, and the winners will be those who adjust.
