How Technology Is Transforming the Role of the New York Public Library

How Technology Is Transforming the Role of the New York Public Library Paul LeClerc The New York Public Library is not only one of the largest and greatest libraries in the world, but, in addition, a number of its collections are geared specifically to serving the arts communities , to promoting the increased understanding and the preservation of the arts through recordings, films, and hard-copy documents, and also to promoting the creation of new works informed by and inspired by our materials. In fact, I think that the vitality and dynamism of the performing arts in New York would be inconceivable in the absence of our Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, which is the largest such facility in the world, with collections now approaching eight million items. As we survey the landscape of contemporary American culture, the impact of information and telecommunications technologies is everywhere apparent. Words, sounds, and images have been liberated from the fixed, two- and threedimensional environments they have inhabited for centuries-environments as known, and therefore as reassuring, as the printed page, the museum wall, the concert hall, or the movie theater. Cultural products are now portable, reproducible , manipulable, retrievable, and accessible to an extent that, as Yogi Berra might have put it, would have Gutenberg turning over in his grave if he were alive today. To be sure, the present array of technologically based cultural products includes CD-ROMs containing digitized versions of the collections of the National Gallery of Art, and the British Museum, and the multimedia CD-ROM on American history from the Library of Congress, which combines images of photographs, printed and manuscript texts, recorded sound, paintings, and sculpture. These products with greater or lesser degrees of interactivity and greater or lesser quantity of content are best seen, in spite of all the "revolutionary " auras that surround them, in the great historical tradition of human inventiveness . This tradition progressed Paul LeClerc, The New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, New York. NY 10018, U.S:A. from the creation of the alphabet to the invention of moveable type, of engraving , of recorded sound, of photographic and moving images, and, most recently, of the computer. Each of these technologies is based on a common principle: reproducibility . That is true of the printed page, of the woodcut, of the human voice, and of an image, whether it be still or moving . The mass multiplication of copies of cultural products, and their dispersal as commodities through domestic and international markets, has been a characteristic of Western societies since Gutenberg began it all in the late 15th century. The phenomenon of art as a reproducible commodity has therefore been around for some 500 years. And successive generations of new technologies have brought the arts to people in dramatically new ways. Each technology has also helped democratize the arts by dispersing them first through the so-called elite population and then through the so-called nonelite population. At the same time, the business practices that accompanied the "commodification " of the arts have rarely fully satisfied the requirements, economic or aesthetic, of those responsible for the creation of the primary object itself: the artist. While the concept of intellectual property rights is an old one, copyright law as we know it dates from the end of the 19th century. And, as we recognize all too painfully, the concept is still totally absent, in practice, if not theory, in a number of countries today. Those of us responsible for managing today's information industry, and those involved in formulating corporate and national policies relative to intellectual property rights, are now engaged in a fairly delicate balancing act. Rights and responsibilities affect at least three communities: first, the creators of artistic expression itself; second , the public that seeks access to the created product; and third, stakeholders who playa role in producing and distributing the product. Members of the latter group include such obvious players as investors, publishers, producers , union members, and so forth. Speaking only for libraries, which founded the information business and have been in it since the time of ancient Alexandria and Ephesus, I can tell you that the information revolution is presently...