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Eugènia Serra
General Coordinator
Biblioteca de Catalunya
Introduction
Digitization, digital libraries and collections, digital preservation, digital repositories… are terms that in a short time have become part of everyday language of libraries, archives, cultural institutions and also services suppliers looking for expanding its market share or redirecting its business.
As usually happens when an opportunity arises, everyone devotes to it if resources allow it, with the desire —inherent to libraries— of disseminating knowledge, information, heritage, research, culture; everyone has started a digitization activity last years, alone or in a collective way. Digitizing is yet a sign of modernity and innovation, and all of are trying to making visible that we are doing it. Actually, the ideal situation would be to have to talk less about it, this would mean that digitization has become a normal activity of our daily dynamics at every level: priorities, processes and resources.
It is usual taking some risks on decision making, it has been necessary to set up initiatives to digitize our holdings as a quick way to show what we are able to do and to get more funding; this is not negative, it is sometimes convenient to jump in with both feet, but the fact is, somehow, we have putting the cart before the horse. When a new service, activity or initiative is promoted, after an initial phase, we should to stop, take distance and think about it to establish solid foundations to continue; a situation with decreased budgets like now offers a good opportunity to do it.
Users: from recipient to partners
The value of information lies on making it public, well-known and useful worldwide in a globalised context; the great collections are not seen valuable because of themselves if they do not make clear their contribution to community, and this community has increased infinitely thanks to the ability to communicate and share with society that technology give us. In a first stage, we have been using digitization to make available content under a model similar to the analogical one, a one-way (unidirectional) model, next step is to evolve towards a bidirectional participating model, from "to users" to "with users", and this applies to any activity of libraries. Our future initiatives —at least this is a challenge we have to face— shall move part of content creation to those who were up to now consumers solely, libraries will become facilitators and present recipients will increase their protagonist role, users will give it value and will feel owners of the common cultural history. A good example that illustrates this model is the portal The Great War Archive from the Oxford University.
Right to information and creation right: a matter of balance
Most of current digitization initiatives give access to a partial history of societies, countries, cultures and languages, the works digitized are mainly in public domain without copyright, due to there are not tools to manage these rights; it is yet very complex identifying whether there are rights or not, if it is public domain, or if it is an orphan work, and when there are rights is very complex to look for copyright owners. Some rights management societies put their databases with information on rights by people they represents on Internet, but not all them and the databases are not exhaustive. Some projects such as the European ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works), with institutions, publishers/produces and societies of rights management involved, want to give answers to, but are yet in a developing phase. An added problem is that diligent search, the mechanism to decide if a work is or not orphan, is not set and agreed. Rights management is a common problem for whole Europe and requires a common position, but the diversification of legislation adds complexity to find a suitable solution for everyone. In this regard, to emphasize the general principles of recently published The Public Domain Manifesto, prepared by Communia, the European thematic network on the digital public domain, specially the first one that says "The Public domain is the rule, the copyright protection is the exception".
Digitization driven by libraries and cultural institutions is serving many uses: divulgation, research, leisure and promotion of both past and present; according to this objectives, it must be built and made available a core collection of current Catalan culture; this requires national agreements with rights management societies, which should be sensitive to the fact that behind digitalization of the institutions there is a social objective and not a commercial purpose. According to news that lately appear in the media about the collection of royalties for many everyday activities that caused unusual situations up to now (such as claiming of payment to hairdressers, to football clubs, etc.), it is difficult to imagine that it can be found a viable solution in a short-term and with sustainable and acceptable costs; cultural institutions have a small influence in front of other agents involved that are powerful lobbies, it is essential a political positioning and an action to facilitate the balance between the rights of creators and the ones of citizens, to consider the compensation model and adjust it to current digital context.
Addition gives better results
Different domains, libraries, archives and museums, often leading digitization around the world, are cooperating, but not enough. There is a lack of collective framework neither of goals as a tools.
From the organizational point of view, to be more efficient and effective we need to know what has been digitized, but also what is planning to digitize our neighbor and how he does it. It is necessary to have tools of identification and coordination to avoid duplicities, registries updated with information on digital surrogates. There are some international initiatives in course like the European Register of Microform and Digital Masters but the presence of Catalan and Spanish content is still minimal (a 1 % of works published in Spain and a 5 % in Spanish). The last years have emerged some collectors of digital repositories in our context such as Hispana, or lately Eureca (Enllaç Unificat a Recursos Electrònics de Catalunya), both are platforms that can contribute to coordinate efforts, even though they cannot substitute the function of registries.
From a conceptual point of view, we have to start to build collective histories, with a sense and a thread, they should be collective because they answer to a common and shared national strategy and guidelines, and the cooperation should be leaded by the governments which have competence, responsibility, resources and channels to discuss about it. However, we do not need to reinvent the wheel, it already exists; we have to take advantage of the work, knowledge and good practices acquired until now, and to bet for a coordination born from a collective task. In this way, results are more coherent and useful without doubt, users do not want to know who have what, they want to find it wherever it is, an archive, a library or a museum, and get it with one sole click; we should focus on the product and the client; if we want to present a Catalan musician like Albéniz we should offer not only his scores or performances, but also his letters, biographies and photographs, wherever they are, and this is something technology allows us nowadays.
New companies for a complex and still uncertain path
Cooperation is frequent among institutions in Catalonia, but in the digital context this is not enough; a great part of content and informative knowledge belongs to institutions and cultural industries, but companies have the technology to manage and disseminate big volumes of information in a effective way, they have resources —at least, much more than institutions— to implement the innovations and enhancements when they appear, companies also own a degree of specialization and a capability of technological evolution not always available, for instance, to libraries.
Digitizing is very expensive for the institutions; the reason is not the copy itself, but all the previous and post tasks around it: selecting, checking the state of documents, cataloguing with MARC21 or metadata, publishing in Internet and preserving the surrogates created. It is a mistake to think that public sector cannot collaborate with private sectors because it betrays its intrinsic principles; although it has generated some polemic in several countries, Google books is —at least in the conditions setting for Catalonia— a good example that the model public-private works for digitization and dissemination of contents. Collaboration is possible and desirable as far as they result in quality services that respect the right of free access to information.
The value of catalogs
Even though it is a fact that good positioning and syndication are the best way to distribute and make known our collections and digital repositories, the library catalog should continue being a window for users to the analogical and digital documents.
The catalog provides certitude, accuracy and completeness; each library, from public to university, national or specialized defines its collection according to its goals and the community it serves. Thanks to years of diffusion, many users know what they can expect to find when they search at the catalogs. The content of digital libraries is however uncertain, there is not always an exhaustive digitization of holdings, neither a development policy behind them.
The catalog is one of the great achievements of libraries, a success reached through many years of outreach, training and education among users and communities. Library users identify the catalog as the tool —par excellence— where to look for information. With the rise of digitization we have created portals, repositories… to promote digital content, but we should not forget the added value of giving access to this information throughout our catalogs.
To conclude
It is remarkable the leap done on quantity and quality last years, with several initiatives underway; the diagnostic report on digitization in Catalonia commissioned by the Department of Culture and Media of the Generalitat of Catalonia presented in March, last year, at the meeting La digitalització de la cultura a Catalunya, collected much of them, but also allowed to observe a lack of overall coordination and a significant distance between libraries, archives and museums.
There is still much to do in Catalonia in terms of digitization, this is a way of learning and improvement that should be done from a collective perspective among institutions, users, companies and governments, it is necessary to have common strategies and a market rich and diverse that provides software and tools to manage portals, contents and services.
Finally, I would add that if the cooperation is essential to digitize and disseminate the content rational and sustainably, it is much more to preserve these new digital documents. The preservation of the digital collections result of digitization or born digital is one of the challenges we have to face to, it is a challenge that we cannot neither cope alone and we can postpone because of the obsolescence of some media and software. The digital preservation is undoubtedly one of the most important issues that should be resolved on digital field the coming years, if we do not, much of our current efforts have been vain.