Two Possible Futures for Libraries By Michael Landau
npono2@pixi.com
ETEC 498 Spring 2004A Possible Positive Future: Toward a Universal Library
The Internet and the advent of digital media bring the dream of a Universal Library within striking distance. By rendering negligible the inherent costs of publication and access, one can at last imagine a world in which every book every written, every piece of music ever recorded, might be freely available on-line to every citizen of the world.
Below you will find a brief bibliography documenting the trends as of April, 2004 in that direction: huge archives of open-source and freeware, on-line free libraries of texts and photos, scanned scrolls and parchments of antiquity. These beginnings inspire hope.
But darker forces are also in play, forces which seek to maximize and channel profit in all transfers of knowledge. In consideration of these less heartening trends, I append for your consideration a brief dystopian satire of a legal nightmare imagined not so far in a potential future which surely can never come to pass - unless we allow it to.
A Possible Negative Future: 10 Years From Now
FINAL SUMMATION BY THE ACCUSED
A Positive Bibliography
Electronic Frontier Foundation. (April 7, 2004). Retrieved from http://eff.org.
Berkely Digital Library SunSITE. (July 23, 2003). Retrieved from http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Collections/.
Project Gutenberg. (April 7, 2004). Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/
Ockerbloom, John Mark.(April 7, 2004). The Online Books Page. Retrieved from http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/.
Washington University in St. Louis. {January, 2004). WUARCHIVE. Retrieved from http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/.