Ninety Years of New Uses and Conflicting Rights

Library, for example, like to boast not only that we have one of the 47 extant copies of the Gutenberg Bible but that ours was the first one to arrive in North America. But in the age of information technology, possession is rapidly losing its sex appeal. If possession used to be nine-tenths of the law in libraries, "access " to information is increasingly our byword. The quality of a library, and its distinction, at least in the eyes of its users , now increasingly depends not only on how well that library and its staff provide access to what it owns, but, most especially , to what it doesn't own-that is, to electronically based information that is either mounted locally through licensing agreements or located off-site but available through networks. Our acquisition budgets are therefore shifting to accommodate not only the actual purchase of materials, something we've alwaysdone, but also the purchase of the rights for our users to access other people's materials. Some at the New York Public Library estimate that, by the year 2000, fully ten percent of our acquisitions budget will be devoted to securing access to content of the latter kind, content that will never become part of our permanent collection. The third sphere in which technology has an impact on libraries follows directly from the second. And that is: what are our obligations to protect the property rights of those who create electronically formatted information products? We have several generations' worth of experience in protecting the copyright status of the printed materials we own. But, as more and more content shifts to electronic form, libraries will be forced to accomplish two goals simultaneously: on the one hand, ensure that such content is available to users at all levels of sophistication and economic means, and, on the other hand, protect the investment made by for-profit information providers by blocking our readers when necessary from downloading data and taking it home with them. The New York Public Library will fulfill these two goals at the new Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) that it is building in the former B. Altman department store building at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue. And we will fulfill them at our other sites throughout New York. A fourth, and final, aspect of technology's ability to change libraries has to do with the opportunities it provides for libraries to be entrepreneurial themselves. And here we enter into a field of considerable complexity. A number of libraries are considering how to tap into their collections and use them for product development, something museums have been doing successfully for years. But any foray on the part of a library into this area poses an interesting series of issues, not the least of which is a significant change in attitude towards our collections. In the past we have been a passive repository of materials made available to patrons, who then transformed their contents into new products. We will now have to become more dynamic institutions that assume some responsibility themselves for such transformations, moving from being a passive content repository to active content provider. Commercial partnerships, such as that between the Vatican library and IBM, are one way of moving here. But whatever direction a library takes, I can assure you that two considerations will, or should, be uppermost in our minds: first, the principal objective of distributing collections, primarily through digitizing them, should be to broaden access. And second, the rights of all those involved in the creation of the originalobject, i.e. text, photograph, recorded sound, or video, must be protected , not only as a legal obligation but as a moral one as well. I hope that these comments help frame some aspects of the property rights issues that are before us today. Admittedly, the perspective is from that of the research library community. But given the central role we intend libraries to play in the national information infrastructure, the issues facing us, and our solutions to them, obviously fit into a broader picture of technology's relationship to creativity and to the arts. Do we have all the answers? Of course not. Are we on the...