Long ago, mankind figured out that special kinds of public institutions are needed to preserve cultural heritage—libraries and museums. They’ve been a grand success, enabling successive generations to learn from and build on the record of man’s achievements and failures.
But a momentous, ill-considered shift is now afoot that threatens to limit the public rights in the collections assembled and maintained, often at public expense, in libraries around the globe.
Today Google and other businesses are scanning millions of books from the world’s great libraries and offering access to them on the Web. This conjures up the vision of a vast, free, Internet public library of accumulated knowledge. It seems like a marriage made in heaven—the union of corporate capital and enormous library collections, carrying knowledge into virtually every home and workplace.
Unfortunately, it’s not.
Source: Universal Access Digital Library Summit (Boston Library Consortium)
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