AS WE MAY THINK

AS WE MAY THINK
by VANNEVAR BUSH

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, JULY 1945

----------------------------------------------------------------------

This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It is reproduced here with their permission.

The electronic version was prepared by Denys Duchier, April 1994. Please email comments and corrections to dduchier@csi.uottawa.ca.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. - The Editor

----------------------------------------------------------------------

This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?

For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there can be little indecision, for their war work has hardly required them to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their objectives remain much the same.

It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride, who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it possible to turn back the enemy. They have worked in combined effort with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now, as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy of their best.

1

Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health.

Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers - conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.

The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings, cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human operator and thousand of times as fast - there are plenty of mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific records.

Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.

Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.

Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably. Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile. Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood. Note the automatic telephone exchange, which has hundred of thousands of such contacts, and yet is reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets - and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an Age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

2

A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted. Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography, followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of modification and extension.

Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination. There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It may well be stereoscopic, and record with spaced glass eyes, for striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the corner.

The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken. On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic? The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many pictures as would result from its use.

Will there be dry photography? It is already here in two forms. When Brady made his Civil War pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time of exposure. Now it has to be wet during development instead. In the future perhaps it need not be wetted at all. There have long been films impregnated with diazo dyes which form a picture without development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye, and the picture can then be taken out into the light and examined. The process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy. Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately.

Another process now in use is also slow, and more or less clumsy. For fifty years impregnated papers have been used which turn dark at every point where an electrical contact touches them, by reason of the chemical change thus produced in an iodine compound included in the paper. They have been used to make records, for a pointer moving across them can leave a trail behind. If the electrical potential on the pointer is varied as it moves, the line becomes light or dark in accordance with the potential.

This scheme is now used in facsimile transmission. The pointer draws a set of closely spaced lines across the paper one after another. As it moves, its potential is varied in accordance with a varying current received over wires from a distant station, where these variations are produced by a photocell which is similarly scanning a picture. At every instant the darkness of the line being drawn is made equal to the darkness of the point on the picture being observed by the photocell. Thus, when the whole picture has been covered, a replica appears at the receiving end.

A scene itself can be just as well looked over line by line by the photocell in this way as can a photograph of the scene. This whole apparatus constitutes a camera, with the added feature, which can be dispensed with if desired, of making its picture at a distance. It is slow, and the picture is poor in detail. Still, it does give another process of dry photography, in which the picture is finished as soon as it is taken.

It would be a brave man who could predict that such a process will always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail. Television equipment today transmits sixteen reasonably good images a second, and it involves only two essential differences from the process described above. For one, the record is made by a moving beam of electrons rather than a moving pointer, for the reason that an electron beam can sweep across the picture very rapidly indeed. The other difference involves merely the use of a screen which glows momentarily when the electrons hit, rather than a chemically treated paper or film which is permanently altered. This speed is necessary in television, for motion pictures rather than stills are the object.

Use chemically treated film in place of the glowing screen, allow the apparatus to transmit one picture rather than a succession, and a rapid camera for dry photography results. The treated film needs to be far faster in action than present examples, but it probably could be. More serious is the objection that this scheme would involve putting the film inside a vacuum chamber, for electron beams behave normally only in such a rarefied environment. This difficulty could be avoided by allowing the electron beam to play on one side of a partition, and by pressing the film against the other side, if this partition were such as to allow the electrons to go through perpendicular to its surface, and to prevent them from spreading out sideways. Such partitions, in crude form, could certainly be constructed, and they will hardly hold up the general development.

Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go. The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.

Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.

Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition, costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the cost of materials. The preparation of the original copy? That introduces the next aspect of the subject.

3

To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the record? He does so indirectly, by talking to a stenographer or a wax cylinder; but the elements are all present if he wishes to have his talk directly produce a typed record. All he needs to do is to take advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter his language.

At a recent World Fair a machine called a Voder was shown. A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal cords entered in the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding keys move. This may be one element of the postulated system.

The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible only to the initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to.

Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing one which better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue, especially in the scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become still less intelligible to the layman.

One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that he projects them for examination.

Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.

Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys down.

All this complication is needed because of the clumsy way in which we have learned to write figures. If we recorded them positionally, simply by the configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic reading mechanism would become comparatively simple. In fact, if the dots are holes, we have the punched-card machine long ago produced by Hollorith for the purposes of the census, and now used throughout business. Some types of complex businesses could hardly operate without these machines.

Adding is only one operation. To perform arithmetical computation involves also subtraction, multiplication, and division, and in addition some method for temporary storage of results, removal from storage for further manipulation, and recording of final results by printing. Machines for these purposes are now of two types: keyboard machines for accounting and the like, manually controlled for the insertion of data, and usually automatically controlled as far as the sequence of operations is concerned; and punched-card machines in which separate operations are usually delegated to a series of machines, and the cards then transferred bodily from one to another. Both forms are very useful; but as far as complex computations are concerned, both are still embryo.

Rapid electrical counting appeared soon after the physicists found it desirable to count cosmic rays. For their own purposes the physicists promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment capable of counting electrical impulses at the rate of 100,000 a second. The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.

Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results
in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation. Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a roomful of girls armed with simple keyboard punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes. There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.

4

The repetitive processes of thought are not confined, however, to matters of arithmetic and statistics. In fact, every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machines. Not so much has been done along these lines, beyond the bounds of arithmetic, as might be done, primarily because of the economics of the situation. The needs of business, and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as production methods were sufficiently advanced.

With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population. There are, however, machines for solving differential equations - and functional and integral equations, for that matter. There are many special machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which predicts the tides. There will be many more, appearing certainly first in the hands of the scientist and in small numbers.

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world; and it was a useful tool - so useful that it still exists.

It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed transformations in accordance with established rules. A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs.

All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just asconfidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the intricate mechanism under the hood. Only then will mathematics be practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge of atomistics to the useful solution of the advanced problems of chemistry, metallurgy, and biology. For this reason there will come more machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Some of them will be sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization.

5

The scientist, however, is not the only person who manipulates data and examines the world about him by the use of logical processes, although he sometimes preserves this appearance by adopting into the fold anyone who becomes logical, much in the manner in which a British labor leader is elevated to knighthood. Whenever logical processes of thought are employed - that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove - there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.

Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be well to produce more assurance in its use. The machines for higher analysis have usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange the relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and rather advanced logic. Progress is inhibited by the exceedingly crude way in which mathematicians express their relationships. They employ a symbolism which grew like Topsy and has little consistency; a strange fact in that most logical field.

A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the reduction of mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then, on beyond the strict logic of the mathematician, lies the application of logic in everyday affairs. We may some day click off arguments on a machine with the same assurance that we now enter sales on a cash register. But the machine of logic will not look like a cash register, even a streamlined model.

So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the record. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before - for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a cabinetmaker. Yet, in a narrow sense and in other areas, something has already been done mechanically on selection. The personnel officer of a factory drops a stack of a few thousand employee cards into a selecting machine, sets a code in accordance with an established convention, and produces in a short time a list of all employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish. Even such devices are much too slow when it comes, for example, to matching a set of fingerprints with one of five millions on file. Selection devices of this sort will soon be speeded up from their present rate of reviewing data at a few hundred a minute. By the use of photocells and microfilm they will survey items at the rate of thousands a second, and will print out duplicates of those selected.

This process, however, is simple selection: it proceeds by examining in turn every one of a large set of items, and by picking out those which have certain specified characteristics. There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station. It requires a few seconds to make the selection, although the process could be speeded up if increased speed were economically warranted. If necessary, it could be made extremely fast by substituting thermionic-tube switching for mechanical switching, so that the full selection could be made in one-hundredth of a second. No one would wish to spend the money necessary to make this change in the telephone system, but the general idea is applicable elsewhere.

Take the prosaic problem of the great department store. Every time a charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done.. The inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and, most important, the customer needs to be charged. A central records device has been developed in which much of this work is done conveniently. The salesman places on a stand the customer's identification card, his own card, and the card taken from the article sold - all punched cards. When he pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery at a central point makes the necessary computations and entries, and the proper receipt is printed for the salesman to pass to the customer.

But there may be ten thousand charge customers doing business with the store, and before the full operation can be completed someone has to select the right card and insert it at the central office. Now rapid selection can slide just the proper card into position in an instant or two, and return it afterward. Another difficulty occurs, however. Someone must read a total on the card, so that the machine can add its computed item to it. Conceivably the cards might be of the dry photography type I have described. Existing totals could then be read by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.

The cards may be in miniature, so that they occupy little space. They must move quickly. They need not be transferred far, but merely into position so that the photocell and recorder can operate on them. Positional dots can enter the data. At the end of the month a machine can readily be made to read these and to print an ordinary bill. With tube selection, in which no mechanical parts are involved in the switches, little time need be occupied in bringing the correct card into use - a second should suffice for the entire operation. The whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire. This method has the advantage of simplicity and ease of erasure. By using photography, however, one can arrange to project the record in enlarged form, and at a distance by using the process common in television equipment.

One can consider rapid selection of this form, and distant projection for other purposes. To be able to key one sheet of a million before an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat the usual file clerk.

6

The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed.

There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.
7

All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations, even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the outranged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.

8

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to stick closely to the methods and elements now known and undergoing rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube. In order that the picture may not be too commonplace, by reason of sticking to present-day patterns, it may be well to mention one such possibility, not to prophesy but merely to suggest, for prophecy based on extension of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is only a doubly involved guess.

All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses - the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?

We know that when the eye sees, all the consequent information is transmitted to the brain by means of electrical vibrations in the channel of the optic nerve. This is an exact analogy with the
electrical vibrations which occur in the cable of a television set: they convey the picture from the photocells which see it to the radio transmitter from which it is broadcast. We know further that if we can approach that cable with the proper instruments, we do not need to touch it; we can pick up those vibrations by electrical induction and thus discover and reproduce the scene which is being transmitted, just as a telephone wire may be tapped for its message.

The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?

By bone conduction we already introduce sounds into the nerve channels of the deaf in order that they may hear. Is it not possible that we may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form? With a couple of electrodes on the skull the encephalograph now produces pen-and-ink traces which bear some relation to the electrical phenomena going on in the brain itself. True, the record is unintelligible, except as it points out certain gross misfunctioning of the cerebral mechanism; but who would now place bounds on where such a thing may lead?

In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness.

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.

Web archive sued over use in another suit

The Internet Archive was created in 1996 as the institutional memory of the online world, storing snapshots of ever-changing Web sites and collecting other multimedia artifacts. Now the nonprofit archive is on the defensive in a legal case that represents a strange turn in the debate over copyrights in the digital age.

The Future of the Book

One of the first acts of the French National Assembly in 1789 was to issue this declaration: "The free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely." UNESCO still defines "book" as "non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers".Yet, have the innovations of the last five years transformed the concept of "book" irreversibly?The now defunct BookTailor used to sell its book-customization software mainly to travel agents. Subscribers assembled their own, private edition tome from a library of electronic content. The emerging idiosyncratic anthology was either printed and bound on demand or packaged as an e-book.Consider what this simple business model does to entrenched and age-old notions such as "original" and "copies", copyright, and book identifiers. Is the "original" the final, user-customized book - or its sources? Should such one-copy print runs be eligible to unique identifiers (for instance, unique ISBN's)? Does the user possess any rights in the final product, compiled by him? Do the copyrights of the original authors still apply?Members of the BookCrossing.com community register their books in a central database, obtain a BCID (BookCrossing ID Number) and then give the book to someone, or simply leave it lying around to be found. The volume's successive owners provide BookCrossing with their coordinates. This innocuous model subverts the legal concept of ownership and transforms the book from a passive, inert object into a catalyst of human interactions. In other words, it returns the book to its origins: a dialog-provoking time capsule.Their proponents protest that e-books are not merely an ephemeral rendition of their print predecessors - they are a new medium, an altogether different reading experience.Consider these options: hyperlinks within the e-book to Web content and reference tools; embedded instant shopping and ordering; divergent, user-interactive, decision driven plotlines; interaction with other e-books using Bluetooth or some other wireless standard; collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities; automatically or periodically updated content; multimedia capabilities; databases of bookmarks, records of reading habits, shopping habits, interaction with other readers, and plot-related decisions; automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation capabilities; full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking capabilities; and more.In an essay titled "The Processed Book", Joseph Esposito expounds on five important capabilities of e-books: as portals or front ends to other sources of information, as self-referencing texts, as platforms being "fingered" by other resources, as input processed by machines, and e-books serving as nodes in networks.E-books, counter their opponents, have changed little beyond format and medium. Audio books are more revolutionary than e-books because they no longer use visual symbols. Consider the scrolling protocols - lateral and vertical. The papyrus, the broadsheet newspaper, and the computer screen are three examples of the vertical kind. The e-book, the microfilm, the vellum, and the print book are instances of the lateral scroll. Nothing new here.E-books are a throwback to the days of the papyrus. The text is placed on one side of a series of connected "leaves". Parchment, by comparison, was multi-paged, easily browseable, and printed on both sides of the leaf. It led to a revolution in publishing and, ultimately, to the print book. All these advances are now being reversed by the e-book, bemoan the antagonists.The truth, as always, is somewhere in mid-ground between derision and fawning.The e-book retains one innovation of the parchment - the hypertext. Early Jewish and Christian texts as well as Roman legal scholarship were inscribed or, later, printed, with numerous inter-textual links. The Talmud, for instance, comprises a main text (the Mishna) surrounded by references to scholarly interpretations (exegesis).Whether on papyrus, vellum, paper, or PDA - all books are portable. The book is like a perpetuum mobile. It disseminates its content virally, by being circulated, and is not diminished or altered in the process. Though physically eroded, it can be copied faithfully. It is permanent and, subject to faithful replication, immutable.Admittedly, e-texts are device-dependent (e-book readers or computer drives). They are format-specific. Changes in technology - both in hardware and in software - render many e-books unreadable. And portability is hampered by battery life, lighting conditions, or the availability of appropriate infrastructure (e.g., of electricity).The printing press technology shattered the content monopoly. In 50 years (1450-1500), the number of books in Europe swelled from a few thousand to more than 9 million. And, as McLuhan noted, it shifted the emphasis from the oral mode of content distribution (i.e., "communication") to the visual mode.E-books are only the latest application of age-old principles to new "content-containers". Every such transmutation yields a surge in content creation and dissemination. The incunabula - the first printed books - made knowledge accessible (sometimes in the vernacular) to scholars and laymen alike and liberated books from the tyranny of monastic scriptoria and "libraries".E-books are promising to do the same.In the foreseeable future, "Book ATMs" placed in remote corners of the Earth would be able to print on demand (POD) any book selected from publishing backlists and front lists comprising millions of titles. Vanity publishers and self-publishing allow authors to overcome editorial barriers to entry and to bring out their work affordably.The Internet is the ideal e-book distribution channel. It threatens the monopoly of the big publishing houses. Ironically, early publishers rebelled against the knowledge monopoly of the Church. The industry flourished in non-theocratic societies such as the Netherlands and England - and languished where religion reigned (the Islamic world, and Medieval Europe).With e-books, content is once more a collaborative effort, as it has been well into the Middle Ages. Knowledge, information, and narratives were once generated through the interactions of authors and audience (remember Socrates). Interactive e-books, multimedia, discussion lists, and collective authorship efforts restore this great tradition.Authors are again the publishers and marketers of their work as they have been well into the 19th century when many books debuted as serialized pamphlets in daily papers or magazines or were sold by subscription. Serialized e-books hark back to these intervallic traditions. E-books may also help restore the balance between best-sellers and midlist authors and between fiction and non-fiction. E-books are best suited to cater to neglected niche markets.E-books, cheaper than even paperbacks, are the quintessential "literature for the millions". Both erstwhile reprint libraries and current e-book publishers specialize in inexpensive books in the public domain (i.e., whose copyright expired). John Bell (competing with Dr. Johnson) put out "The Poets of Great Britain" in 1777-83. Each of the 109 volumes cost six shillings (compared to the usual guinea or more). The Railway Library of novels (1,300 volumes) costs 1 shilling apiece only eight decades later. The price proceeded to dive throughout the next century and a half. E-books and POD resume this trend.The plunge in book prices, the lowering of barriers to entry aided by new technologies and plentiful credit, the proliferation of publishers, and the cutthroat competition among booksellers was such that price regulation (cartel) had to be introduced. Net publisher prices, trade discounts, and list prices are all anti-competitive practices of 19th century Europe. Still, this lamentable period also gave rise to trade associations, publishers organizations, literary agents, author contracts, royalties agreements, mass marketing, and standardized copyrights.The Internet is often perceived to be nothing more than a glorified - though digitized - mail order catalogue. But e-books are different. Legislators and courts have yet to establish if e-books are books at all. Existing contracts between authors and publishers may not cover the electronic rendition of texts. E-books also offer serious price competition to more traditional forms of publishing and are, thus, likely to provoke a realignment of the entire industry.Rights may have to be re-assigned, revenues re-distributed, contractual relationships reconsidered. Hitherto, e-books amounted to little more that re-formatted renditions of the print editions. But authors are increasingly publishing their books primarily or exclusively as e-books thus undermining both hardcovers and paperbacks.Luddite printers and publishers resisted - often violently - every phase in the evolution of the trade: stereotyping, the iron press, the application of steam power, mechanical typecasting and typesetting, new methods of reproducing illustrations, cloth bindings, machine-made paper, ready-bound books, paperbacks, book clubs, and book tokens.Without exception, they eventually relented and embraced the new technologies to considerable commercial advantage. Similarly, publishers were initially hesitant and reluctant to adopt the Internet, POD, and e-publishing. It is not surprising that they came around.Printed books in the 17th and 18th centuries were derided by their contemporaries as inferior to their laboriously hand-made antecedents and to the incunabula. These complaints are reminiscent of current criticisms of the new media (Internet, e-books): shoddy workmanship, shabby appearance, and rampant piracy.The first decades following the invention of the printing press, were, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it "a restless, highly competitive free for all ... (with) enormous vitality and variety (often leading to) careless work". There were egregious acts of piracy - for instance, the illicit copying of the Aldine Latin "pocket books", or the all-pervasive book-bootlegging in England in the 17th century, a direct outcome of over-regulation and coercive copyright monopolies.Shakespeare's work was repeatedly replicated by infringers of emerging intellectual property rights. Later, the American colonies became the world's centre of industrialized and systematic book piracy. Confronted with abundant and cheap pirated foreign books, local authors resorted to freelancing in magazines and lecture tours in a vain effort to make ends meet.Pirates and unlicensed - and, therefore, subversive - publishers were prosecuted under a variety of monopoly and libel laws and, later, under national security and obscenity laws. Both royal and "democratic" governments acted ruthlessly to preserve their control of publishing.John Milton wrote his passionate plea against censorship, Areopagitica, in response to the 1643 licensing ordinance passed by the British Parliament. The revolutionary Copyright Act of 1709 in England decreed that authors and publishers are entitled to exclusively reap the commercial benefits of their endeavors, though only for a prescribed period of time.The never-abating battle between industrial-commercial publishers with their ever more potent technological and legal arsenal and the free-spirited arts and craftsmanship crowd now rages as fiercely as ever in numerous discussion lists, fora, tomes, and conferences.William Morris started the "private press" movement in England in the 19th century to counter what he regarded as the callous commercialization of book publishing. When the printing press was invented, it was put to commercial use by private entrepreneurs (traders) of the day. Established "publishers" (monasteries), with a few exceptions (e.g., in Augsburg, Germany and in Subiaco, Italy) shunned it as a major threat to culture and civilization. Their attacks on printing read like the litanies against self-publishing or corporate-controlled publishing today.But, as readership expanded - women and the poor became increasingly literate - the number of publishers multiplied. At the beginning of the 19th century, innovative lithographic and offset processes allowed publishers in the West to add illustrations (at first, black and white and then in color), tables, detailed maps and anatomical charts, and other graphics to their books.Publishers and librarians scuffled over formats (book sizes) and fonts (Gothic versus Roman) but consumer preferences prevailed. The multimedia book was born. E-books will, probably, undergo a similar transition from static digital renditions of a print edition - to lively, colorful, interactive and commercially enabled objects.The commercial lending library and, later, the free library were two additional reactions to increasing demand. As early as the 18th century, publishers and booksellers expressed the - groundless - fear that libraries will cannibalize their trade. Yet, libraries have actually enhanced book sales and have become a major market in their own right. They are likely to do the same for e-books.Publishing has always been a social pursuit, heavily dependent on social developments, such as the spread of literacy and the liberation of minorities (especially, of women). As every new format matures, it is subjected to regulation from within and from without. E-books and other digital content are no exception. Hence the recurrent and current attempts at restrictive regulation and the legal skirmishes that follow them.At its inception, every new variant of content packaging was deemed "dangerous". The Church, formerly the largest publisher of bibles and other religious and "earthly" texts and the upholder and protector of reading in the Dark Ages, castigated and censored the printing of "heretical" books, especially the vernacular bibles of the Reformation.It even restored the Inquisition for the specific purpose of controlling book publishing. In 1559, it issued the Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("Index of Prohibited Books"). A few, mainly Dutch, publishers ended up on the stake. European rulers issued proclamations against "naughty printed books" of heresy and sedition.The printing of books was subject to licensing by the Privy Council in England. The very concept of copyright arose out of the forced recording of titles in the register of the English Stationer's Company, a royal instrument of influence and intrigue. Such obligatory registration granted the publisher the right to exclusively copy the registered book - or, more frequently, a class of books - for a number of years, but politically constrained printable content, often by force.Freedom of the press and free speech are still distant dreams in most parts of the earth. Even in the USA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the V-chip and other privacy-invading, dissemination-inhibiting, and censorship-imposing measures perpetuate a veteran though not so venerable tradition.The more it changes, the more it stays the same. If the history of the book teaches us anything it is that there are no limits to the ingenuity with which publishers, authors, and booksellers, re-invent old practices. Technological and marketing innovations are invariably perceived as threats - only to be upheld later as articles of faith. Publishing faces the same issues and challenges it faced five hundred years ago and responds to them in much the same way.

Creative Commons and Creative Commons Search Tools

How many times have you had a patron come into your library or resource center and ask for help on a project, report, class assignment, or presentation? How often do they ask for print materials —ources — audio, video, graphics — all for use in school/college presentations, business meetings, or their own independent projects? We librarians need to help the current library user find all types of content, not just print, but the entire range of content available — text, audio (music, voice), video, film, graphics, and images. A current user of the library might want to create his or her own podcast, audio blog, or recording and be in need of copyright-free audio (music or speech) that can be re-mixed, sampled, or created as a mash-up for release to an online community. Maybe you have ho needs video footage. Or a patron who needs graphics or images for a business or school presentation. Can you help them find what they need? Can you help them find materials in the public domain that they can copy, re-mix, sample, share, display, and distribute in a final report, a presentation, a blog, a podcast, or a Web site posting?

The federal government offers access to a wealth of public domain content that can be used in creative and interesting ways. Most content created by the federal government is not protected under existing copyright laws.¹ The Library of Congress and the National Archives have vast collections of photographs and prints, videos and movies, and audio recordings available for use. Just to be on the safe side, though, always read the fine print when you use audio, video, film, or images from the Library of Congress — or, indeed, any other archive, museum, or public library. Likewise, many Web sites from the executive branch of the federal government offer extensive digital collections.²

How can you help patrons identify public domain content that might come from blogs, podcasts, Web sites, and organizations? Existing copyright laws have made it more difficult to identify public domain content. Why? Because everything copyrighted once exists in a “tangible medium.” What does this mean? The e-mail you sent to your brother is protected by copyright. The picture you took at your cousin’s wedding is copyright-protected. The sketch you made of your dog while sitting through another boring meeting is also protected under current copyright law. Consequently, there is no way, until recently, to identify not only what materials the “public” already owns, so to speak, but what materials owners of the copyright might want to make available for others to use, without requiring the them to ask for permission. Of course, even the generous might have some limits on use....

A Quick Overview of Copyright Law: 1790–2005

Copyright law has undergone significant and far-reaching changes since 1790 when Congress first implemented the copyright provisions as spelled out in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution. In that original copyright law, Congress has the authority to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for a limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries.” The law “granted American authors the right to print, re-print, or publish their work for a period of 14 years and to renew for another 14.”³ The framers of the Constitution and the law that codified the implementation said that copyright “was meant to provide an incentive to authors, artists, and scientists to create original works by providing creators with a monopoly. At the same time, the monopoly was limited in order to stimulate creativity and the advancement of ‘science and the useful arts’ through wide public access to works in the ‘public domain.’”⁶ However, to receive all the protections of copyright, the person seeking copyright protection had to register the work. If you failed to register the work, you lost all copyright protections and your work would enter into the public domain.

For major changes to protections, the next major revision came about in 1909 when Congress increased the list of protected works and also extended copyright to include all works of an author. The act also extended the term of protection to 28 years with the possibility of a one-time renewal of another 28 years.⁷

Copyright protections underwent major and significant revision again with the Copyright Act of 1976. Congress made the revision for two important reasons: technological changes producing new media types requiring specific coverage and compliance with international copyright laws and practices, specifically the Berne Convention. The Copyright Act of 1976 had several far-reaching consequences. The Act “preempted all previous copyright law and extended the term of protection to life of the author plus 50 years (works for hire were protected for 75 years). The act covered the following areas: scope and subject matter of works covered, exclusive rights, copyright term, copyright notice and copyright registration, copyright infringement, fair use and defenses, and remedies to infringement. With this revision, for the first time the fair use and first sale doctrines were codified and copyright was extended to unpublished works.”⁸

In addition, the 1976 revision dramatically changed the previous requirements surrounding registration and renewal of works. Previously, as we have seen, one had to register the work with the Copyright Office to claim all the rights and protections of copyright law. With the Copyright Act of 1976, you no longer had to register or renew copyright to enjoy all its protections. “Henceforth, everything — from e-mail message to doodles on a napkin — was automatically copyrighted the moment it was ‘fixed in a tangible medium.’”⁹

In 1988, the United States signed onto the terms of the Berne Convention. Consequently, this meant “greater protection for proprietors, new copyright relationships with 24 countries, and elimination of the requirement of copyright notice for copyright protection.”¹⁰

Since the major revision of 1976, copyright law has undergone two other important changes. In 1998, Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). The Copyright Term Extension Act extended the “duration of U.S. copyrights by 20 years. Before the act, copyrights lasted for the life of the author plus 50 years. After the act, copyrights lasted the life of the author, plus 70 years in the case of individual works, or 75 to 95 years in the case of works of corporate authorship and works first published before January 1, 1978. It also affected works still under copyright that were published prior to this date, increasing their term of protection by 20 years as well.”¹¹

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 “prohibits gaining unauthorized access to a work by circumventing a technological protection measure put in place by the copyright owner where such protection measure otherwise effectively controls access to a copyrighted work.”¹² In other words, if the owner of the copyright has implemented a technological control that prevents you from copying, distributing, sharing, or sampling the work, you cannot develop a means of breaking that control. If you develop software tools that can break the copyright protection control, you violate the DMCA and become subject to prosecution.

Some disagree with the path of modern copyright legislation. Larry Lessig makes the point in his book, Free Culture, that the previous copyright renewal system “assured that the maximum terms of copyright would be granted only for works where they were wanted. After the initial term of 14 years, if it wasn’t worth it to an author to renew his copyright, then it wasn’t worth it to society to insist on the copyright, either.”¹³ Since that initial law, copyright has been revised many times, with this net result — copyright is for the life of the author plus 70 years and 95 years for corporate authorship. These extensions seem to fly in the face of the original intent of that first copyright law. Limited copyrights would protect the creator of the work for 14 years or, if they acted to renew copyright, up to 28 years. After that, the work went into the public domain where anyone could use it. Lessig comments that “the effect of these extensions is simply to toll, or delay, the passing of works into the public domain.”¹⁴ “Thus, in the 20 years after the Sonny Bono Act, while 1 million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term.”¹⁵ We have moved away from the “cultural commons,” where ideas can be shared, distributed, improved — the original intent of Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers. We have moved toward what Larry Lessig calls the “permission culture.” If you want to use something you must get permission first. The system used to be an opt-in system in which creators were required to register works to receive copyright protections. Since 1978, the system has changed from an opt-in system to an opt-out system.¹⁶ The bottom line for Lessig and others who share his mindscape is that the public domain is suffering and, by extension, creativity and innovation as well.

Creative Commons

What to do about it? Enter the Creative Commons. The Creative Commons Foundation, the innovative brainchild of an impressive list of lawyers, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, and publishers, came to be in 2001. The Board of Directors of the Creative Commons Foundation includes:

• Lawrence Lessig (chairman and professor of law at Stanford University)

• James Boyle (professor of law at Duke University)

• Michael Carroll (formerly an attorney with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and currently an assistant professor of law at Villanova University School of Law)

• Molly Shaffer Van Housweling (formerly the executive director of Creative Commons and currently assistant professor at the University of Michigan Law School)

• Hal Abelson (co-director of the MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance in educational technology and co-head of the MIT Council on Educational Technology),

• Eric Saltzman (attorney and filmmaker)

• Davis Guggenheim (director and producer of both documentary and dramatic films and television)

• Joi Ito (founder and CEO of Neoteny, a venture capital firm)

• Eric Eldred (editor and publisher of Eldritch Press)

The foundation’s goal is to build a reasonable copyright that encourages authors, filmmakers, photographers, and/or musicians to allow others to use their works by opting out of the onerous and burdensome requirements of existing copyright law. It seeks to create a system that promotes “balance, compromise, and moderation” with respect to copyrights and to “offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them….”¹⁷ Think of it this way. “Share what you want, keep what you want.”¹⁸ Their vision moves away from the restrictive “All rights Reserved”/ “No Rights Reserved” realities of current copyright law to a middle ground — “Some Rights Reserved.”

The inspiration behind Creative Commons came from Richard Stallman and the creation of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). Lessig and the Creative Commons board wanted to apply the same principles that Stallman had developed for software to text, film, audio, and images. They want to develop tools and resources for today’s authors, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers who want to share their work with others by specifying what people can and cannot use without permission. They aim “to increase the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier.” In thinking about this, they developed three important pieces that together make this goal achievable. The pieces include a commons deed — “a simple, plain-language summary of the license, complete with the relevant icons,” the legal code — the fine print that you need to be sure the license will stand up in court,” and the digital code — a machine-readable translation of the license that helps search engines and other applications identify your work by its terms of use.”¹⁹ The Creative Commons Web site [http://creativecommons.org] has all the licenses listed and information to help those interested in sharing their work to identify which license fits their specific needs and requirements.

Take a look at all the Creative Commons’ licenses. The licenses explain clearly what people can and cannot and provide examples of how to decide what kind of license to use. A series of discussion groups deal with questions about real-life experiences [http://creativecommons.org/discuss]. As with any new organization, there are bound to be growing pains, and Creative Commons is no different than any other new group. The discussion groups help identify issues and challenges that need to be addressed, worked through, and solved.

One of the really creative aspects of the Creative Commons licensing tools is the use of metadata embedded directly into the license itself. By utilizing metadata, based on RDF/XML specifications, the founders of Creative Commons support the vision of the Semantic Web. They also lend their support to developers to create tools (search engines and file-sharing applications) that take advantage of the embedded metadata and help the end user and the librarian find specific types of content — text, audio, video, film, speeches, music, and images. When this happens, we will all have an easier time finding and identifying materials to use in our own creative works.

How to Find and Identify Creative Commons Licensed Work

The Creative Commons Web site provides several different ways to identify and find works that have a Creative Commons license. Under the Find section of the Creative Commons home page, you will find a list of browsing and searching options. The browsing option is arranged by directories and then by type of media: audio, images, video, and educational. Although not comprehensive, the Common Content directory can be an effective way to browse for Creative Commons content.

You can also find new content, new announcements, interviews, and new tools via the Creative Commons home page and the Creative Commons blog. You can sign up for the newsletter and use an RSS feed for both the blog and for the site as a whole.

Searching for Creative Commons Content

Creative Commons also offers a search engine (powered by Nutch — an open source search engine) that lets searchers limit their search by type of format (audio, image, interactive, text, and video) and by different licensing options [http://creativecommons.org/find/]. You can search for works available for commercial purposes or for works that can be modified, adapted, or built upon. After you have done a search, the results will connect to Web sites that contain either the Creative Commons metadata or a link back to a Creative Commons license. Results display the licensing options that the owner has agreed to allow.

I did a search on “Glacier National Park” and limited results to include works that can be modified, adapted, or built upon. (Glacier National Park in Montana is one of the real national park treasures and a great place to go cycling — some really great climbs).

Results

Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Montana ... high up in Glacier National Park. A view from ... Downes Copyright © 2004 Stephen Downes National ... (v) http://www.downes.ca/photos/montana.htm

If you forget what all of the icons represent, the system provides a key that shows the icons and describes what each icon means. This is a very nice touch. Also, the search engine links (v) to a little program called ccValidator. This program inspects and displays license metadata associated with any page. Pretty cool.

Warning: Once you have identified a site that contains content that you might want to use, it is critical that you read the fine print of the license. You need to know if the author of the content is making one, some, or all content available under the Creative Commons license. Likewise, if you decide to publish your content under a Creative Commons license, it is in your interest to specify exactly what content you are making available under the Creative Commons license. Creative Commons provides a list of examples of what others are doing in this regard.²⁰

The Creative Commons search engine is a great way to learn about new Creative Commons content, but, unless you know about the search engine, Creative Commons content becomes essentially opaque to most end users.

Creative Commons Can Help

The browsing option reaches only a small sampling of Creative Commons licensed content. The Creative Commons team refuses to develop a comprehensive directory or database of Creative Commons content because they feel it undermines the vision of the Net — a distributed, decentralized network. Consequently, there is no complete directory. And this frankly is a real disappointment and a glaring weakness. I would argue that they should stop looking at the development of a directory/database as “a centralized, Soviet-style information bank controlled by a single organization” (the quote comes from Creative Commons FAQ — Is Creative Commons building a database of licensed content? [http://creativecommons.org/faq#faq_entry_3482]). Instead, they should consider a directory as a celebration of the work being done and, most importantly, a tool for the student, the musician, the photographer, and the entrepreneur in finding other content they need. If Creative Commons is not prepared to step up and create a complete directory/database of Creative Commons content, then maybe Yahoo! can fill this void. What better organization is equipped to develop a directory than Yahoo!? So ask Yahoo! to build a directory that will help all of us find Creative Commons content. If you ask, Yahoo! might just do it and it really needs to be done.

To answer my original questions, librarians now have a useful tool they can use to help identify content that patrons might want to use in a podcast, a mash-up, a collage, a video contribution to a blog, a document, a presentation, or whatever. It’s called Creative Commons and, with the vertical search opportunities provided by Yahoo! Search and Creative Commons’ own Nutch-powered search engine, we can assist end users in finding new content that allows them copyright flexibility. Use it. Promote it. Share it. It’s all good.

Endnotes

¹ There are some exceptions to federal government information and copyright. If you are a government contractor and you produce a report or presentation, the contract will determine if that information, even though paid for by the taxpayers, could be copyrighted. It is best to look and see if the information holds a copyright symbol.

² U.S. Copyright Office — Copyright Basics [http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html] (accessed April 30, 2005).

³ Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States — Association of Research Libraries [http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html].

⁴ Creative Commons — About The Sampling Licenses [http://creativecommons.org/projects/sampling].

⁵ Music — Sampling Licenses [http://creativecommons.org/about/sampling].

⁶ Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States — Association of Research Libraries [http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html].

⁷ Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States — Association of Research Libraries [http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html] and Digital Law Online,
Professor Lee A. Hollaar, School of Computing, University of Utah [http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise4.html].

⁸ Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States — Association of Research Libraries [http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html].

⁹ Robert S. Boynton, “The Tyranny of Copyright?” The New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2005 [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?
res=F70B1EFB3F5D0C768EDDA80894DC404482], or [http://www.cepr.net/Economic_Reporting_Review/
nytimesarticles/tyrannycopyright.htm].

¹⁰ Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States — Association of Research Libraries [http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html].

¹¹ Wikipedia, The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act] (accessed on April 29, 2005).

¹² Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States — Association of Research Libraries [http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html].

¹³ Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004, pp. 133–134.

¹⁴ Free Culture, p. 134.

¹⁵ Free Culture, pp. 134–135.

¹⁶ Robert S. Boynton, “The Tyranny of Copyright?,” The New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2005 [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?
res= F70B1EFB3F5D0C768EDDA80894DC404482], or [http://www.cepr.net/Economic_Reporting_Review/
nytimesarticles/tyrannycopyright.htm].

¹⁷ Creative Commons — About Us [http://creativecommons.org/about/history] (accessed on April 30, 2005).

¹⁸ Framasoft — Creative Commons: Let’s Be Creative Together (May 27, 2004) [http://www.framasoft.net/article2389.html#nb2] (accessed April 30, 2005).

¹⁹ Creative Commons FAQ — So what, exactly, does Creative Commons plan to do? [http://creativecommons.org/faq#faq_3310].

²⁰ Take a look at the page “How to Tag Works.” This page gives useful suggestions and examples of how authors and bloggers are tagging their pages with Creative Commons Licenses [http://creativecommons.org/technology/web].

²¹ Flickr — Creative Commons licensing options [http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/].

Google’s Library Project: Questions, Questions, Questions

Librarians, academicians, journalists, information industry pundits, and real people continue to ring in with comments, concerns, quarrels, and commendations for Google’s new library program. “This is the day the world changes,” said John Wilkin, a University of Michigan librarian working with Google. “It will be disruptive because some people will worry that this is the beginning of the end of libraries. But this is something we have to do to revitalize the profession and make it more meaningful.” Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, told the Free Press: “This project signals an era when the printed record of civilization is accessible to every person in the world with Internet access. It is an initiative with tremendous impact today and endless future possibilities.” When asked whether Google is building the library to replace all other libraries, Google representatives—after saluting the role of librarians—said they had “no such plans at the moment. There was too much work to do.”

Here is a roundup of some of the questions asked and answers posited:

• Will the content Google derives from this library program become part of Google Scholar?
  
  • A Google representative had no answer at this time; however, he did say that it seemed “a natural intersection.”
    
• What will this cost Google?
  
  • Many questioned the technology and techniques it would require to perform the Herculean effort—and the costs entailed. Some observers conjectured that performing the project in a 6-year time frame would require an average scan rate of 3,200 volumes a day (365 days a year) for the University of Michigan’s 7 million volumes alone; others applied the same work schedule and came up with 2.25 books per minute. When asked about feasible costs for digitization (estimated by some at $10 per book), Gordon Macomber, president and CEO of Thomson Gale (which has extensive experience in digitizing its Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Nineteenth Century Collections Online licensed products), indicated that $10 per book was below Gale’s experienced cost. All agreed it was a huge undertaking.
    
• How will Google handle duplicates between the libraries?
  
  • Google staff had no answer. However, Jay Jordan, president and CEO of OCLC, pointed out that OCLC has a digital registry—available for a nominal fee—that lists what has been digitally preserved and what’s in the queue. The University of Michigan is reportedly harvesting catalog records for its content contributions.
    
• Is this project English-language only?
  
  • Michael Keller, Stanford’s library director and director of academic information resources, stated that Stanford planned to contribute non-English texts—in particular, European languages using Roman alphabet characters. But he pointed out that Google can process in other alphabets, e.g., Kanji or Arabic.
    
• What about archiving considerations? How durable will this electronic library be?
  
  • The participating libraries have announced robust efforts to protect the digital collection copies Google will return to them. The University of Michigan will store files on gold CD-ROMs with a stress-test life of 3 centuries. Stanford will keep at least three copies of magnetic tape cartridges that will be continually tested and maintained.
    
  • I did not ask, but I assume Google will protect its bread-and-butter content, especially content as expensive to acquire as this, with due diligence.
    
• What effect will this library-based digitization have on Google’s relationships with publishers? Is it designed to push publishers into joining the Google Print program?
  
  • Google representatives rejected any charges that this project was meant to hammer publishers into joining Google Print. However, they did point out: “[P]articipating in the original Google Print does offer significant benefits, namely by creating a book-selling link, using the publisher log, providing links back to the publisher’s Web site, and additional reporting. It also allows us to show more than just the snippet view, which can lead to greater purchase decisions.” Also, currently, books retrieved from the publisher contributions to Google Print do not have a “Find It in a Library” link as material from the scanned library collections does.
    
  • OCLC’s Jordan didn’t think Google had to “herd anyone” among the publishers. “With the exposure Google Print offers publishers, they can’t afford not to be there, because other publishers are. It’s the Chicken Little syndrome.”
    
  • Patricia Schroeder, executive director of the Association of American Publishers, commented on winners and losers as Google enters this field. She saw it as giving a “huge pump to print-on-demand” and said this development could “solve the returns problem. In fact, it could solve a lot of supply chain problems.” Building acceptance of reading electronic texts, she thought, would encourage book sales by lowering prices for e-books. But overall, Schroeder thought it would not threaten publishers. “At the end of the day, what we can produce is creative, and that’s harder than techies think it is. We will still need publisher staffs.” Schroeder considers reprint houses and libraries to be vulnerable, however.
    
• How might Google’s competitors, such as Yahoo! or Microsoft, respond to this challenge?
  
  • Unless someone can come up with a deal with the Library of Congress and/or The British Library, it’s hard to see how anyone could counter this massive infusion of content. Will large research libraries soon have Microsoft or Yahoo! knocking on their doors? Perhaps. And not just those current competitors. What about Amazon, itself a digitizer of books for its “Search Inside the Book” program? After Google finishes its titanic project, it will have created—at the very least—earth’s largest out-of-print bookstore, a mammoth electronic re-issuance of copyrighted and non-copyrighted publications from publishers around the world. Permissions from publishers could clear the way for Google to enter the electronic bookselling arena in a big way. (Again, Google representatives had nothing to say about future marketing plans in this area.)
    
• What impact could this project have on current digitization projects?
  
  • One observer who runs a digital library project of 175,000 documents in approximately 10 million images commented that his and every other digital library project had now become “small-scale.” He considered that Google and its participating library partners had “broken through mental barriers of scale, technology, and copyright law. This rocks the world.” A representative of a leading research library consortium predicted that the new project could table or even kill current digitization projects at libraries, while the librarians waited tsee if their planned projects were necessary or, assuming their content was unique, if Google might someday digitize that content for free.
    
  • On the other hand, Marjorie Hlava of Access Innovations, a consulting and software house for library automation, considered the new program could only help them. With Google “lowering the bar” and simplifying digitization, she expected more people to get interested in such projects. She expected even more interest in Access’ software offerings to provide the needed precision through taxonomies, source coding, customization, etc.—the precision that Google lacks, according to Hlava.
    
  • Other ways to get online books clearly exist—ways that allow for downloading public domain books, e.g., Project Gutenberg, the Online Books Page from Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania, and even the “Million Book Project” between the Internet Archive, Carnegie Mellon University, the Library of Congress, and other libraries. Libraries can license book collections from fee-based services such as OCLC’s netLibrary, which has a public domain component, or ebrary’s fee-based library service. However, the most any of these projects—fee or free—currently offer is tens of thousands of books, not millions.
    
  • As for digitization projects produced and funded by library vendors, I asked several executives from among the database aggregators what impact they thought Google’s effort would have over time. The general public position seemed to follow the maxim of “a rising tide lifts all boats,” rather than the tsunami image. Macomber of Thomson Gale forecasts that sales would stay robust for the company’s public domain historical collections. “Anything and everything that draws the attention of people interested in scholarly reference content helps our business and that of other publishers of scholarly works. We’ve never had a time where scholarly content was in such a bright light. There’s opportunity there. It’s now a matter of realizing the greater demand and serving the greater market. The fact that it’s a smaller share, but of a much larger market, that’s the important change.” He also expected to win through providing added value, e.g., the Shakespeare Online spinoff of other digitization with multiple imaged versions of the plays, critical essays, biographical material, etc., all collected in one compact online product.
    
• Will librarians be threatened by the new development?
  
  • The Internet doesn’t scare Carol Brey-Casino, current president of the American Library Association. In a Wall Street Journal interview, she said: “We had this conversation when the Internet began to get popular, and what’s happened is that library visits have doubled in the last decade to 1.2 billion.” Consulting firm Outsell did point out (“Google to Digitize Library Book Holdings,” http://now.outsellinc.com/now/2004/12/google_t_digit.html) that, despite the efforts of “consortia and library groups that have been working on digitization issues in libraries for years … it took an outsider third party, Google, to pull this off.” While admitting that the possession of vast financial resources enabled Google to take on such a task, Outsell also attributed the development to the fact that “Google is the only player with the audacity to act on the grand vision … it took an outsider to really go after the content buried in books.” Outsell does not think the development will destroy libraries as we know them. In fact, the company’s leaders think that process is already well under way, and they welcome the change. “This isn’t a death knell for libraries; it’s another shove to get librarians out from behind the stacks and harness their expertise, including subject-matter expertise, and to enhance users’ ability to find, use, and access information in any format. Getting out of the business of simply storing books should be a welcome goal.”
    
  • Google doesn’t scare Michael Gorman, dean of library services at California State University at Fresno and president-elect of the American Library Association. Gorman had almost nothing good to say about the Google library project in an op-ed piece published in the Los Angeles Times (“Google and God’s Mind,” Dec. 17, 2004) and picked up by other newspapers. He starts off his piece referring to “the boogie-woogie Google boys” and goes on from there, concluding “that enormous databases of digitized whole books, especially scholarly books, are expensive exercises in futility based on the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of communication (electronic) will supplant and obliterate all previous forms.” Gorman does state his approval of online access to reference material and digitization of unique manuscripts and images, although Google’s library partners do not make the latter material available for the project. (Other remarks in the piece seem to indicate that Gorman has not tested Google Print search results specifically.) Gorman says it is “premature to prepare to mourn the death of libraries and the death of the book…. This latest version of Google hype will no doubt join taking personal commuter helicopters to work and carrying the Library of Congress in a briefcase on microfilm as ‘back to the future’ failures, for the simple reason that they were solutions in search of a problem.” Instead, he suggests people should accustom themselves to a “short wait” for “the active and developed interlibrary lending system that supplies thousands of books daily to scholars, researchers, and dilettantes worldwide.” (I asked OCLC’s Jordan whether OCLC had plans in the works to make ILL delivery nationwide with a quick turnaround. He confirmed OCLC employees were working on the issues, but—at this point—they do not have a way for libraries to verify credit cards, which would seem a necessary, “deposit fund” precondition for any massive transfer of assets by the nation’s libraries.) By the way, a recent Library Journal story indicated that Gorman has “taken LIS education as the theme of his presidency.”
    
  • John Berry of Library Journal viewed the Google library program as “another great leap forward for access to information, a paradigm shift in our time.” As for the future of librarians, Berry said: “Every time anything like this comes even close, the role of librarians is strengthened and made more central. This will happen again. We’ll go back to our basics—evaluation and provision of information sources, helping people authenticate currency, comprehensiveness, accuracy, and so forth.”
    
  • Marjorie Hlava pointed out a practical consideration. “It costs $200 a square foot to maintain a library collection (heating, utilities, building costs, staff, etc.). If I had 132 miles of shelf space and someone offered to digitize half of it, I’d be real interested.” And, after the digitization, Hlava expected people would be tempted to downsize their physical collections. OCLC’s Jordan agreed. He expected the libraries in the program to “re-purpose” their funds, for example by building up their special collections.
    
  • Mary Case, library director at the University of Illinois at Chicago, cut to the chase: “If we dig in our heels, we’ll just look stupid. It’s coming. We must use it.”
    
• What’s next for Google? Are there any other prized content collections in its line of sight?
  
  • I asked Google representatives about other kinds of public domain books, e.g., “copyleft” (author’s permission granted in advance) or government documents, e.g., GPO Access content. They indicated that “all of that is on target. It’s a matter of prioritization.”
    
  • Other collections of material would seem tbe logical extensions to the library program, e.g., ProQuest’s compilation of a century or more of doctoral dissertations and masters’ theses. The Pennsylvania Library Association held an October debate on the relationship between libraries and Google at its annual conference (Brian Kenney, ed. “Googlizers vs. Resistors,” Library Journal, December 2004, pp. 44–46). At that panel session, Googlizer Richard Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, described a test of putting 3,600 theses and dissertations online and into Google’s hands. In the first 3 years, users went from 50 to 500,000. I asked ProQuest’s Suzanne BeDell, vice president of higher education publishing (and a Resistor on the panel), and Mary Sauer-Games, director of publishing, whether ProQuest would consider opening up its collection to Google Print. Another branch of ProQuest is apparently in conversations with Google Print. BeDell said, “Any opportunity for us at ProQuest to help increase usage of data [that] librarians are already subscribing to—and Google can really help to do that as can any Web-based search tool—is a real opportunity.” She also reported that ProQuest has purchased and installed a new high-speed scanner for digitizing microform content. “Yes,” said BeDell, “Google is a disruptive technology. This Google project will fundamentally change what we do in our business, but, that being said, it’s a great opportunity. It’s bringing so much to the table in one fell swoop; the opportunities are outstanding.”