From Widener to the World Wide Web

Bill Gates, the father of the Geek Pantheon, has said that he will not read more than four or five pages at a time off of a computer screen. But digital consumption of text is growing every day. Most Harvard students lack even a cursory knowledge of what is contained in the prodigious collections of Widener Library, and few could navigate the stacks without a map. In this generation of HOLLIS-dependent undergrads, the only romance associated with the library can be found in the smutty open dialogue of Bored@Lamont or late-night hookups in Widener. Thanks to the boom in digitized literature, students are increasingly able to forego the simple pleasures of the musty, dimly lit, and seemingly innumerable corridors of Widener: now the books are going online.

With new developments in the digital revolution—an opaque term that essentially denotes all technological progress—the literary landscape is increasingly being pushed into the digital realm, for better or for worse. And while some students may relish the era of yellowed pages and crackling spines, Harvard is making its way onto the digital scene in force.

HARVARD’S DIGITAL INITIATIVE

There is, on the most basic level, a dual front to Harvard’s progress into the digital world. The first is manned by the Library Digital Initiative (LDI), and the second by the Google Library Project.

The Library Digital Initiative is a five-year effort funded internally by Harvard University. It was proposed in 1997 and since its inception, its focus has been to build tools necessary for further digitization. The LDI has divided its funding among a number of projects spanning Harvard’s incredibly large, decentralized library system. The money distributed by the LDI goes to funding both acquisitions and digitization of current holdings, which is an intricate and costly process.

The Open Collections Program is an example of Harvard’s foray into the digital realm. The project was started in 2002 and serves a community much broader than Harvard’s own. Sidney Verba ’53, the former director of the Harvard University Library, characterizes its mission as an outreach effort: “What we’re trying to do is use digitization to make a large part of the collection...publicly available to everybody, so that people at colleges not as well endowed with research materials, [and] people all over­—whether they’re involved in a college or not—getting access to what you could get access to as a member of the Harvard community.”

The Open Collections Program has already launched two open collections. The two topics covered are “Women Working 1800-1930” and “Immigration to the United States 1789-1930.” These collections include a huge amount of material.

The other important player in the digitization of Harvard’s libraries has been the Google Library Project. Perhaps in a quest to validate a commonly held student belief that all the knowledge in the world is available on Google, the company introduced a Book Search tool in 2004. Google is currently working with Harvard’s library, among others, to scan all public domain books. The company is also scanning copyrighted books, although not at Harvard, allowing them to be searched but not read in their entirety, but faces legal challenges from publishers. Google enables the reader to search these online tomes as well as locate them in the library nearest them.

COSTS AND BENEFITS

The goal of all of these programs is open access, but Google isn’t a universal solution. Robert C. Darnton ’60, the current director of the Harvard University Library, says Google has its shortcomings.

“I don’t think Google is the big rock candy mountain; Google isn’t going to solve all the problems,” Darnton says. “But I do think that open access is something that really matters.” David D. Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, also acknowledges the virtues of Google, saying, “If the fastest way to [provide open access] is to involve a commercial company, then it makes sense to me.”

Weinberger points out another perk more pertinent to the Harvard community. “One of the great advantages of digitized information is it’s far easier to chase down dead ends,” he says. For Weinberger, the importance of digitization is primarily found “one level of abstraction up from the content itself,” in the realm of metadata and search.

Metadata is identifying information that is programmed into these online texts, making them easier to search and locate. It’s important to get metadata right because metadata is how these online works can be located in the vast ether of the digital world, and also gives digital works a leg up on hardcopy books. According to Weinberger, “Books create an ethos in which thoughts succeed by being self-contained. The web creates an ethos in which works succeed also by linking outward from themselves. Both have value. You can do both digitally.”

In addition to becoming easily searchable, digitized libraries are becoming much more readily available. Houghton Library, Harvard’s holder of rare books and manuscripts, is in the process of digitizing selected pieces from its catalog. Medieval manuscripts and digitized papyri can already be found in striking clarity and vivid color online.

The digital images may even show more than the naked eye can see; a viewer can enlarge and zoom in on these images to reveal intricate details that might otherwise go unnoticed by the untrained eye.

Some works whose delicacy makes their availability severely limited, like the herbarium of Emily Dickinson, can now be viewed online. William P. Stoneman, a librarian at Houghton Library, has seen many benefits to the costly process of digitization. “In the short term, a lot more people are getting a lot easier access to the portions of the collections that have been digitized,” Stoneman says. “It’s much easier for people anywhere in the world to get access to the material. I think that means we’re beginning to see signs that it’s being used a lot more extensively.”

You may need a Harvard ID to swipe into Widener, but anyone can access the collections online.

“It’s not just open collections or open access as it goes according to the current formulas, but openness in general so that Harvard, which has these great intellectual riches, can share the wealth with the rest of the world,” says Darnton. But Darnton—new this year as director of the University Library—also sees much room for improvement with the current information systems.

“Why can’t all dissertations be made fully accessible online? Why can’t we have lecture notes, and reserved reading, and course packs, and all kinds of what’s called ‘gray literature’...why can’t we make everything, this whole world of scholarly communication available free?” asks Darnton. “It seems to me that the new information society of the 21st century should be open, accessible to everyone, and that Harvard should take the lead in making that happen.”

DIGITAL ACQUISITIONS

With electronic resources and acquisitions becoming more and more common, the Harvard Library faculty has had to grapple with how to manage these materials. Digital publications still cluster in areas of science, technology, and medicine, and the high prices of these materials are subject to the whims of publishers. While the faculty of Harvard is fighting to obtain the rights to their own published works so that they can be used free of charge, the library system has to continue to pay indefinitely.

“Most digital resources are licensed—we purchase access to the materials, rather than owning them outright,” Dan C. Hazen, associate librarian of Harvard College for collection development, writes in an e-mail. This means that once the payments stop, the access to information stops too. In addition, these electronic resources are licensed for the entire community, which creates even more problems. “This being decentralized Harvard, we then have some fairly complicated committees and oversight structures to allocate costs across all of Harvard’s faculties and schools, since there isn’t a central pool of funds that would cover these sorts of expenses,” Hazen writes.

Other problems include preserving digital literature. According to Darnton, “No one has solved the problem of preserving such material while hardware and software change at a dizzying pace.” The current, short-term fix is to “migrate” digital collections between different hardware and software formats, but this process is complicated and time consuming.

THE DEATH OF THE BOOK?

With the increase in digitization, one question weighs heavily on the minds of many involved with the Harvard library system: how will this change the role of the book? There doesn’t seem to be an easy answer.

Both Verba and Darnton share an opinion that digitization may not impair book readership and sales, but could actually boost them instead.

“There’s something about a book, and it is also one of the world’s greatest technologies, in that it is a technology that doesn’t change,” says Verba.

Darnton echoes his sentiments, saying, “you can leaf through them, you can do all kinds of things; they’re much more user-friendly than digitized [material], and scrolling.”

“I think publishers and authors can make their books known by making them accessible online,” Darnton continues. “Then the reader will go and buy them if the reader likes the book.” On the conflict between books and new technology, Verba says, “Of course more people come [to the library] because they find more books, so in a sense they’re not rivals.”

Weinberger envisions a different future, albeit perhaps a more distant one.

“There will be a time when we will get the hardware and software right to pretty much replace paper,” he says. While he doesn’t discount the merit of the traditional book format, he expounds on the opportunities digitized reading could provide.

“When books are usefully online, we readers will be online with them,” he says. “Reading won’t only be a private activity, it can also be a social activity,” with readers communicating about the material through annotations and notes.

That is not to say he predicts the fall of books altogether; rather, he believes that they will become less important in time.

“We’ve seen already, in just a dozen years on the web, that our thought takes other forms,” Weinberger says. Take blogs or encyclopedia articles filled with cross-indexed links for examples. Not knowing what tomorrow’s technology will hold, however, even Weinberger must concede that traditional media hold a privileged place among today’s readers.

“Books are an established form, and they will always be used for the sort of communication that they’re good at,” he says.

—Staff writer Joshua J. Kearney can be reached at kearney@fas.harvard.edu.