Translator: Ivana Korom Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
For the past 40 years,
our media ecosystem has been changing.
I say 40 years since we all remember that
Internet was born in 1969.
We probably are, in the history of the Internet,
already in a third phase of the history of community networks;
in the 70s and 80s there was the web,
now we have the Web 2.0.
We are already used
to the idea of convergence,
a strictly academic concept until very recently,
which is the idea that the same distributing channel
is used to deliver all multimedia contents available.
A very large research is starting to talk about
"digital natives".
This digital native, his head was cropped for privacy reasons,
is my son, a 3-year-old child
who uses paper Disney books
as comfortably as he uses an iPad
and the switch, in his daily media diet
of old and new, is absolutely natural.
In this context,
libraries find themselves in a special place.
Starting back in 1800, ancient history,
public libraries became the base of operations,
as well as the symbol of universal access
to the media ecosystem,
an ecosystem that in 1800 was much simpler,
much more limited than today.
Libraries today, especially the public libraries
that cater to a very large public, the non-specific public,
non-academic, non-archives related,
non-historians related,
these libraries are tied to the traditional media system
and therefore at risk of a very fast obsolescence.
We will save them from this aging
only if we help them enter fully in a new phase
of digital culture.
The US and Europe are two different digital ecosystems,
and we can tell them apart by size;
what has really been happening in the last years
shaped a scenario of profound separation.
On one side, huge companies
ready to compete on a global scale
with a new way of content distribution:
Amazon, Google, Apple;
on the other side, in Europe, no company
is capable of competing, and they don't even try,
on a really global scale.
A continent of users.
The situation of libraries
reflects precisely this reality.
The map that I am showing you,
which we cannot obviously analyze in detail,
displays how much, today,
e-books have spread in American libraries.
The total of the map tells us that 67 percent
of American public libraries
offers a collection of e-books to their users.
That other small chart, hardly readable from your seats,
shows us the impact of American public libraries
and this is another differentiating factor between us.
In the United States, in 2009,
69 citizens out of 100 went to a public library.
In Italy only 11.7 did. One fifth.
In the United States, participation
in public libraries is greater
that the actual voting population.
How can change happen in libraries,
what happened in American libraries,
and what has to be done in Italian and European libraries?
What you are seeing here is the checkout counter,
it almost looks like an airport check-in counter,
the counter of a large and exceptional public library
which is in this city.
A library that lends
around one million objects a year,
but they are physical objects.
What we have to do, the process we need to initiate,
is to transfer these transactions to the web
and think about a "digital lending" model.
On the basis of this analysis which I briefly presented,
in 2009 we started "medialibraryonline,"
which is at the same time an enterprise project,
my own company's project,
and a vast cooperative project
that directly involves public libraries.
We started with a few hundred supporters,
two years on we can count 2000 libraries in 10 regions,
with many more joining every day.
What is it, and what does this service offer?
It is easily summarised.
First of all, remote access to contents for all users,
that is the possibility to access all contents of the library
from a website,
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
It is a shared platform
that enables the libraries to cooperate among them,
optimizing costs in a very efficient way.
This is a topic
that I cannot explore in detail,
but the bottom line is that
a library in Aosta and one in Sicily
can buy contents together
allowing, in the daily operative management
of library funds,
for important savings and room for further improvement.
Just to give you an idea, consider
that, in most efficient areas of the country,
transaction costs of library lending,
excluding the cost of the content itself,
is between 3 and 6 euro;
this means that, every time an efficient library in Italy
lends something,
the aggregate costs of managing the process range
between 3 and 6 euro.
If you gave this money to my company
we could give this content to users as a gift.
Another aspect is the huge collection of digital contents.
I'll give you a quick overview
of what is available today:
40 thousand e-books, 1500 newspapers from 80 countries in 40 languages,
many videos, but this is an area
that still has to be vastly improved,
audiobooks, 3.5 million music tracks
that add up to many hundred thousand music albums.
These are all contents
which users can borrow
simply logging in a platform
and accessing the contents that their library
purchased on its own
following the traditional model
of content distribution in public libraries;
but with different models:
an e-book, the latest novel by Umberto Eco for example,
is borrowed and saved by the user
and remains available for 14 days,
after which it becomes available
for another user.
For different contents though,
distributing models are totally different.
But this is still not enough.
It is an important project
in which I strongly believe.
It is an enterprise project
that will spread even more.
But it still not enough.
This image, the frieze you can see here,
in on Boston Public Library main door:
"Free to All," open and available for everyone.
As a country, there is something on which we could still have time
to compete with more advanced countries
like the United States, South Korea
and realities more advanced than ours.
It is the design
of a large, national, Italian library.
This is the question to ask:
is it possible to preserve the 1800s ideal
of a large container of culture
as a whole, accessible for all?
Or has this idea disappeared,
become obsolete for technical, social and legal reasons?
We have to answer and address
this question.
What is "all" the content?
Well, this is something that we can trace
quite easily.
All the content means all the books,
all the filmed material, all the music.
You can imagine it, roughly,
like an area that includes the following sectors:
on one side you have the copyrighted material,
think about the books, the commercially available ones
and the not for sale ones, among which
you have a very small sub-section,
extremely hard to manage,
consisting of the so called "orphaned works,"
those for which we know there should be
a copyright holder but we are unable to find it,
we don't know where it is or we cannot identify it.
On the other side you have the section composed
of copyrighted material, although licensed for free
under particular licenses --
most of you will have heard about
Creative Common licenses and similar models --
or public domain works,
for which the copyrights have expired.
This model, this is the over-simplified version,
can be applied uniformly
across all multimedia contents.
If you want to build a large national library
you have to include all these things.
Nevertheless, achieving success in such a quest
is extremely complicated.
In the USA, Google started
a super digitalizing campaign
that led to the digitalization
of roughly 15 million tomes,
and that faced legal obstacles that seemed unbeatable
in the USA and in other countries.
New initiatives are seeing the light:
these two photos that I put up
in one of my closing slides
are of Robert Darnton, a notable historian
and director of Harvard University Library,
he is promoting the idea
of a Digital Public Library of America,
a national library of digital contents.
What I find extraordinary,
and that I think we should try to replicate in our country,
is the fact that this library is not public
in the sense that it is run by a government agency
or a branch of the public administration.
The word "public" in the USA
is more similar to
what was defined by Eleanor Hallstrom,
who recently won the Nobel Prize for economy,
in her theory of Commons, shared goods,
as a system of self-regulation that goes in a different direction
than the distinction between private and public.
The construction of a national digital library
implies relationships and dynamics
between public and private that are completely new,
totally unheard,
without which this task could be
entirely impossible to accomplish.
New laws are necessary, new licenses,
new contract models, a dynamic set or rules
that is capable of absorbing all the new features
that will derive from the evolution of digital publishing.
In short, a true new economy of libraries.
Digitalization processes of library material, today in Italy,
are at their lowest.
The Italian government doesn't invest a single euro.
The only large project is one
created by the Ministry of Cultural Resources
in partnership with Google,
it will digitalize, in theory, one million books in the next few years
from the central national library in Florence.
Well, what we will try to do,
not alone as a company
but looking for a very large array of partners,
is trying to react to this status quo
and for once trying to react
without asking for government funds;
we will try to put together a number of subjects
that will obviously have to include
government components as well, but not exclusively,
in order to be able to build a large container
that could look like and could be able to compete
with the service provided to users
that is being created in the USA and in other countries.
Our project started without funds in 2009,
with just a few partners
that are growing very fast.
I have the feeling that this is one of the ways
that could make such a large and ambitious idea
become reality.
With a lot of patience, it could persuade
a large number of subjects
that this can actually be done,
which is an important added value
of the operation.
Quite simply, what is at stake
is the possibility of reproducing
a model for the transmission of our culture
and the possibility to keep under control,
from the point of view of structures to access knowledge,
the gap we have from more advanced countries.
My impression is that,
not only our elected officials, but more in general
whoever has responsibility for what concerns contents,
these people do not have a clear perception
of the magnitude of this gap
and that we need to react,
not with posters, nor with political rallies,
but with very precise pragmatic actions.
Thank you.
(Applause)