Digitization and public domain

I got an email at work the other day about a "call for action to protect the public domain" at a recent event organized by the Boston Library Consortium, Inc. The people in attendance were from the research and academic communities. I'm not sure if people from public libraries were there, too. But apparently this is becoming a bigger concern - protecting the public's rights to access materials that are in the public domain. (This does not refer to items that are under copyright.)

I gather what is happening is that as more and more materials - books, documents, records - are being digitalized, sometimes they are not as widely available to the public as they could be. The examples in the email were that when the Google Book Project digitizes items, these are only available through the Google search engine. And Google has digitized at least one million items. I guess that Google sets the charge, but the email didn't mention what this was.

The Internet Archive works in cooperation with the Open Content Alliance to digitize volumes from library collections- the cost is about $30 for a volume or $.10 a page for the half a million items it has digitized. I wasn't totally clear on this, but it sounds like this may be a one time fee to the library, and then the materials are "accessible universally." One project the Internet Archive is taking on is the scanning and electronic preservation of a quarter of a million pages of Massachusetts state laws from 1620 on. They are doing this in collaboration with the State Library of Massachusetts and the University of Massachusetts.

I hadn't realized this could be a problem. That a company or some institution could take on the digitization of a book or document and then not make it widely available. This whole issue reminds me of open source versus proprietary software. It seems that there is a concern out there, especially among librarians and professors at academic institutions, that they need to set standards for the digitizing of items, and make sure that these standards include assuring accessibility to the scanned items for everyone.

The email ended by saying that the people at the conference have "blazed a trail" for all institutions, libraries, and museums to use in order to work together to make knowledge accessible to everyone. That this knowledge should be "unrestricted by choice of technology, location or socio-economic status."

If an item were digitalized, and the digitalized version was only made available through a certain technology, then one might say - well, a person could still access the printed version. But I could imagine several scenarios where this would be difficult, if not impossible. A person could be too far away to access the printed copy. Or the printed copy could be so old or in such bad shape, that it isn't available to view. In these cases, as in others that I haven't thought of here, the only version of the item possible for the person to view would be the digitized one. Therefore, if there was limited access to the digitized version, this would be a problem if the goal is to make knowledge accessible to all. I suppose another group could also digitized the same item and then make it available to all, however, this seems like a waste of resources. So I can see why the people at this event are concerned. Save on resources, digitize the item once, and make it widely available. A fee would be charged to cover costs and labor. I could see where academic institutions, museums and other institutions could work together to do the above. I suppose that's why this gathering was convened.