When they write the book on great libraries of the world, a few legendary names will come to mind: Alexandria; Pergamum (the city where papyrus is said to have been invented) in what is now Turkey; the British Library; the New York Public Library; and of course, the U.S. Library of Congress. The new public library here in Cambridge, MA, will not be on anyone’s list. But I have been driving down Broadway past its construction site for several years now, watching as it went from a hole in the ground to a beautiful ultra-modern structure that opened Sunday afternoon. And the same thought passed through my mind each and every day: A great library for a great innovation city.

So you can bet I was there Sunday for the official opening (although I waited until halftime of the Patriots game)—and joined hundreds of others who had descended on the place. Everyone was oozing excitement. And although the checkout line stretched from the spectacular lobby halfway up the stairs to the second floor—it turns out some 1,750 visitors passed through in the three hours the library was open Sunday–no one was complaining. The director, Susan Flannery, couldn’t be happier. “Yesterday, in three hours, we checked out over 4,000 items,” she told me on Monday. “We had a ton of high school kids here today.”

I know writing about a public library is a stretch for biz-tech news blog like Xconomy. But at the same time, education and learning is the source of innovation—and I was personally so inspired by the library that I couldn’t help writing about it. Given the way it was drawing students, especially, I even asked Flannery if we could expect a renaissance of learning and innovation here in Cambridge as a result of the library. Cambridge has always been rich in learning, she responded, not quite taking the bait. “We’re just making it more appealing and easier to do.”

But there are a few things on the technology front worth mentioning that at least go toward that end. Free public Wi-Fi is available throughout the building. The library has nearly 100 publicly accessible computers (a few are dedicated to online catalogs, but the vast majority are unrestricted). About 20 are in a dedicated computer room, another dozen in the teen room, 10 or so in the children’s room, 8 in the research room, and the rest spaced throughout the facility (sadly, they are all Windows machines—no Macs!). There is also an extensive digital media catalog for downloading e-books and audiobooks—but that’s part of the overall Minuteman Library Network that serves 42 libraries in the Metrowest region of Massachusetts and is not special to the new Cambridge library. Flannery says the library has a grant that will allow it to buy some handheld electronic readers (a la Kindle) that may be available for loan, and that it also plans to add Nintendo Wiis to the teen room and purchase a couple of interactive white boards for the general library that can be used for everything from watching movies to collaborating on projects through their touch interface.

4,000 items were checked out in 3 hours.

But back to my tour. There are three floors above ground and two below—and the modern new structure connects to the old main library, which itself has been completely redone. (Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the public high school, is the next building down—and it is fantastic that this great library is within such easy reach for students. I can happily report that both my kids, who attend Rindge and Latin, can’t wait to go and study there—and if their peers feel the same, the project might have already paid for itself.) I roamed all over the building: the only place I couldn’t go was the lowest level, which houses meeting rooms and a 230-seat auditorium and was closed off for the day. “It’s fabulously gorgeous,” says Flannery of hte auditorium. She says that in addition to state-of-the-art audio/visual system, the space is equipped with an audio enhancement system for the hearing impaired.

The total cost of the project was $90 million, Flannery says (though that included other, non-library work done in conjunction with the renovation). The state contributed a $10 million grant, and the rest was paid for by the city of Cambridge, she says. The lead architects of this great library are William Rawn Associates of Boston, with Ann Beha Architects, also of Boston, as the associate architect. With no floor or carpet glues or other volatile organic compounds, a lighting system that shuts off when there is enough light from the sun, and bamboo flooring in the children’s room, it will be LEED certified as a green building. And here is the landing page for all sorts of other information about the library.

But I didn’t really interview anyone in depth for this story. I just went in, scribbled notes, and took a bunch of pictures. And I reveled. Below are my photos (the first two were taken earlier this fall) and some impressions: the captions come above the images. Click on any image to make it larger.

The long view from Broadway.

Old library meets the new. A glass hallway and courtyard connects them.

Opening day, Sunday, November 8, 2009.

In we go. The place was ablur with action. Really—it isn’t the photo.

To continue viewing photos, go to the next page. … Next Page »

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The biggest development in the digital media world this week, by far, was the settlement of a pair of class-action copyright-infringement lawsuits brought against Google in 2005 by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and several publishing houses. The compromise agreement, which was announced October 28 and now awaits approval by the federal courts, could eventually result in improved access to books, especially the millions of books that are no longer in print but are still covered by U.S. copyrights. It promises to free Google to move forward with its ambitious library digitization effort, which will put a vast collection of literature at the fingertips of students, researchers, and at least a few public library patrons. It should also placate the Chicken Littles in the publishing industry, who have spent years using every available means, including the Google lawsuit itself, to obstruct the sharing of knowledge enabled by the digital revolution.

But for readers—the group whose interests are closest to my own heart, and the only major class of stakeholders in the lawsuit whose interests weren’t being protected by a team of well-paid attorneys—the Book Search settlement contains some major disappointments. I should emphasize that I am not a lawyer, and I have only spent a few hours studying the settlement agreement. (It’s 323 pages long, which may explain why it took the parties more than two years to negotiate a solution.) But I’m saddened by the gap between the level of open access to literature that was considered possible when Google first launched its project to digitize millions of library books and what we’re probably going to get as a result of this agreement.

Specifically, the settlement seems to put an end to hopes that the Google Library Project would result in widespread free or low-cost electronic access to books that are out of print but have not yet passed into the public domain. These books—and there are millions of them—are in a painful state of limbo. They’re deemed commercially non-viable by their original publishers, so you can’t find them in most bookstores. Yet no one else can republish them without getting permission from the original copyright holders or their heirs or assignees—and for many so-called “orphan works,” these rightsholders can’t even be identified or located. So the only way to read one of these books is to find a copy at a used bookseller, or figure out which public or academic library owns a copy, and then physically travel there.

The hope was that Google—consistent with its stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—would simplify access to these out-of-print but still-presumptively-copyrighted books by sharing their full text over the Internet at little or no cost to readers, the same way it does with the public-domain books it has digitized. (Under U.S. law, the copyright on all works published before January 1, 1923, has irrevocably expired, and Google lets readers peruse and download these books for free. If you click here, for example, you can read my favorite novel of all time, E.M. Forster’s 1910 masterpiece Howards End.)

If Google had chosen to take the lawsuit to trial and prevailed, it might have been at liberty to do this, monetizing the practice (just as it monetizes all of its other services) through keyword-based advertising. Such a service would have been a great boon to readers everywhere. Indeed, when I interviewed a bunch of librarians about the Google initiative back in 2005, before the lawsuit, most of them were ecstatic: they’d been waiting for years for someone to come along and help them put their collections online. I bet Google could even have charged a little something for the service—after all, nobody else is trying to scan so many library books (7 million of them so far).

Alas, the nation’s authors and publishers organized a campaign to stop Google. Letting avarice run roughshod over common sense and the common good, the plaintiffs in Authors Guild et al. v. Google and McGraw Hill et al. v. Google argued that the very act of scanning an in-copyright book without the rightsholder’s permission is an egregious copyright violation. Even the short snippets of text that Google Book Search serves up among its search results were too much for these groups to stomach. (This despite the fact that the courts long ago ratified the inclusion of snippets in general Web search results as an example of “fair use” under copyright law.)

It quickly became clear that the plaintiffs in the lawsuits would sooner see out-of-print books remain in limbo forever than sacrifice one penny of potential profit to Google. No matter that these authors and publishers weren’t even marketing the books Google was scanning: if the rightsholders themselves couldn’t figure out how to make money on their out-of-print titles, no upstart search-gizmo company was going to, either.

It may surprise you that, as a writer, I’m on Google’s side in this dispute. But my point of view is that decent writers can always find ways to get paid for their work. They shouldn’t have to leech off the people who … Next Page »

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If there’s one thing New England has in great supply, it’s books. And that makes the area one of the battlegrounds in the digital library wars—the competition between commercial entities such as Google and Microsoft and non-profit groups such as the Internet Archive to secure agreements to scan, digitize, and distribute the world’s print literature. This week a large subset of the region’s libraries threw their weight behind the non-profit camp, signaling the growing resistance to Google’s professed goal of organizing “all the world’s information.”

The Boston Library Consortium, a group of 19 state, college, institutional, and university libraries around New England, announced Monday that it has chosen the Open Content Alliance (OCA) as the main technology partner in a massive effort to digitize public-domain books and other materials (that is, those not subject to copyright or no longer covered by copyright). The project—which will result in “a freely accessible library of digital materials from all 19 member institutions,” according to a statement from the consortium—will be based at a new facility at the Boston Public Library, built around automated book-scanning machines developed by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive.

Local library leaders greeted the announcement as a victory for taxpayers. “The Boston Library Consortium includes some pretty significant publicly funded institutions—the Boston Public Library, for instance, as well as the State Library of Massachusetts and the flagship state libraries of Connecticut and New Hampshire,” notes Ann Wolpert, director of libraries at MIT, which is part of the consortium. “These libraries, which are funded by taxpayers, really have a public purpose, and I think that for them, the argument of joining the OCA rather than going with one of the more commercial partners was simply a matter of being true to their funding base. Rather than put their work in a proprietary environment, searchable only by one search engine, [the consortium] felt strongly that it would be important to make sure that whatever they digitize should be available to taxpayers without constraint.” Libraries at the private colleges and universities belonging to the consortium, including MIT, Brandeis, Tufts, Brown, and Williams, “were happy to honor that point of view,” says Wolpert.

At stake for every library considering how to digitize its collections is the question of how to help readers find the material once it’s online. Google is credited by many members of the library community with kick-starting the entire digitization movement in 2004 with its massive Google Print project (now known as Google Book Search). But the same librarians have shied away from working with the search giant, largely due to the company’s requirement, mentioned by Wolpert, that books digitized via its factory-scale scanning effort be searchable exclusively through the Google search engine. Microsoft, which has its own book digization project, Live Search Books, imposes similar terms.

Yahoo and the Internet Archive, a non-profit created by software entrepreneur and Alexa founder Brewster Kahle, launched the OCA in 2005 as a non-commercial alternative to the Google project. The alliance’s goal is to build a permanent archive of digitized text and multimedia content from collections around the world, using open standards for the “metadata” such as author and title information that makes these materials more discoverable and searchable. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, the OCA has already digitized more than 100,000 volumes from private, national, and university collections—including the personal library of John Adams, held by the Boston Public Library. The materials are indexed by the OCA members’ own search engines and by the Internet Archive.

“Going with OCA was a very concerted effort by the Consortium, and the primary reason is for the material to remain free and open,” says Barbara Preece, the consortium’s executive director. “People weren’t happy with the restrictions that Google and Microsoft put on—that you can only search from the single search engine. These groups are not interested in content. They are interested in search and advertising. And the fear is that this content would be restricted only to people who can afford to get it.”

One local institution conspicuously absent from the Boston Library Consortium and from the agreement with the OCA is the Harvard University Library, which, with its 15.8 million volumes, is the largest academic library in the world. Harvard was among the five institutions partnering with Google when it launched Google Print, and still has an agreement with Google to digitize the public-domain books in its collection.

But the same local library leaders who advocate the OCA’s non-commercial, non-exclusive approach to book digitization stop short of criticizing Harvard for sticking with Google. In fact, some welcome the presence of competing philosophies as libraries go through the digital transition. “It’s a very important time to have lots of experiments running, to test different notions of how to do industrial-scale digitizing,” says MIT’s Wolpert. “And so my point of view on this is the more the merrier, because we’ll learn from every one of these undertakings. Frankly, I think that Google gets enormous credit for having gotten the ball rolling.”

Library professionals in other regions are applauding the Boston consortium’s move. “Given the dispersal of print materials across the North American landscape, it’s good news anytime you get a cluster of institutions coming together” on open digitization efforts, says Nancy Elkington, director of partner relations at RLG Programs, the R&D wing of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a 40-year-old library cooperative that maintains the WorldCat global union catalog.

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