The DODL, the NDIIPP, and the Copyright Conundrum

The occasion that stimulated this paper provided an opportunity to discuss issues of critical importance to both publishers and librarians. In what follows, I hope to explain not only what those things are but also why they are urgent.

Currently, in the United States, the Library of Congress (LC) is involved in two programs that are of particular importance to it and potentially of importance to all who care about maximizing the benefits of digital technology for information service. Both programs have acronymic names that are, at best, mysterious, and, at worst, weird. One is called the DODL and the other is the NDIIPP. DODL stands for Distributed Open Digital Library, and NDIIPP stands for National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.

The DODL is being created by the Digital Library Federation, which is—parenthetically—also trying to find a more harmonious name or acronym for it. The DODL's development has become international, because the Digital Library Federation has just been joined by the British Library, the federation's first strategic partner outside of the United States, and others may follow.

Within the United States, the Digital Library Federation has 32 member institutions and four affiliates. Most of the institutions are the libraries of major research universities, but the federation also includes the New York Public Library, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the U.S. National Archives, and the Library of Congress.

Last fall the members of the federation committed themselves to creating jointly something first envisioned in 1995 at the time of the federation's founding—a collaborative digital library that will provide global electronic access to collections in multiple institutions. This Distributed Open Digital Library—the DODL—will provide users with one point of entry to multiple, digitized collections. Moreover, the federation hopes that this distributed library will provide services using a deep finding system and specialized portals to help scholars locate material for their individual fields and specific studies. The DODL's collection will begin with materials in the humanities and social sciences and will transcend regions to concentrate on topics, themes, genres, and formats, including material in special collections.

The Digital Library Federation, which is supported primarily by its members including the Library of Congress, is in the process of generating financing for the DODL, of appointing a coordinator for it, of forming a collections development working group to plan development of the DODL's content, and of forming a technical working group that will develop an enabling infrastructure for the collaborative library. It will build on a range of achievements in digital library development by federation members and others internationally over the past several years. The DODL's time has come.

At the same time, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program—the NDIIPP—is under development at the Library of Congress. This program is focused on preserving the kinds of materials that digital libraries such as the DODL are creating.

There is widespread concern about how to preserve, long-term, all the digital materials that publishers, libraries, scholars, and others are creating. Digital media are much less stable than paper. Obsolescence in rapidly changing computer hardware and software can render digital materials unreadable. And new digital formats are being created more rapidly than we are creating capabilities for preserving them.

This concern has reached the Congress of the United States, which has appropriated $100 million for the NDIIPP's development. Our Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress has developed a plan for the NDIIPP that drew widely on expertise from many kinds of organizations outside the library, and the plan calls for the NDIIPP to be developed as a partnership with other institutions. This winter the library has been collaborating with the National Science Foundation to fund research for the NDIIPP through a call for proposals that will result in cooperative agreements with partnering institutions.

I have stressed the collaborative nature of both the DODL and the NDIIPP, because neither the Library of Congress nor any other one institution in the United States or elsewhere can, by itself, hope to create an...