Using Massive Digital Libraries

Citation

John Azzolini (2015), "Using Massive Digital Libraries", The Electronic Library, Vol. 33 No. 4, pp. 865-867. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-01-2015-0016

The library world is no different from other spaces when it comes to increases in scale. If big enough, they have a way of creating qualitative effects with ramifications decidedly different from what came before. Several digital libraries have grown enough in size that some librarians see in them novel information entities. Offering unprecedentedly large and diverse digitized content, they are thought to bring distinct challenges to issues of copyright, collection development, user service and cataloging. Not surprisingly, the literature on these so-called massive digital libraries (MDLs) is quite slim in comparison to that on their smaller counterparts.

Andrew Weiss, the digital services librarian at California State University, Northridge, makes a noteworthy attempt at clarifying these library-related issues and adding to the literature in Using Massive Digital Libraries: A LITA Guide. He acknowledges that these new incarnations build substantially on the technological and administrative foundations that have influenced the direction of digital libraries for the past two decades. Yet, a prominent handful of them have grown in content by at least one order of magnitude. Weiss contends this dramatic leap has introduced complexities in various areas of library practice that must be reckoned with if the field is to progress.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1: Background, begins with a brief survey of the intellectual and technological history behind digital library developments. Then, the differentiating characteristics of the MDL are placed in the context of library-specific criteria (collection size; acquisitions, collection development and copyright concerns; content type; collection diversity; content access; metadata; and content and digital preservation). Weiss also sets out the major MDL players in the USA and Europe. Among the former are the two libraries that the author will focus on throughout the subsequent chapters, Google Books and HathiTrust. This first part concludes with an exploration of how MDLs will interact with the library’s more traditional roles, such as access to old and rare materials, interlibrary loan, collection shaping and weeding and digital and print preservation.

Part 2: The Philosophical Issues, devotes four chapters to tracing the intellectual impact of MDLs on several of librarianship’s key topics: copyright, collection development, collection diversity and access. Weiss shows how the intersection of MDLs with these time-honored library issues are creating controversies (such as the legal disputes of the Authors Guild with HathiTrust and Google Books), yet he persuades us of the possibilities that these expansive digital resources have for enriching the field. Especially salient is the author’s passionate stand that unfettered open-access content and the earnest pursuit of linguistic and cultural diversity in collection development are integral to the continuing value of MDLs.

The book’s two concluding chapters comprise Part 3: Practical Applications. They touch upon some of MDLs’ versatile applications, such as their potential for supplementing print collections through print-on-demand models and for contributing to quantitative methods of studying the humanities and social sciences, for example via the use of the Google Books N-gram Viewer. Also examined (with Google Books as an illustrative example) are real-world issues such as the legibility of page text after scanning and the relevance of metadata quality. The final chapter finishes with a report on a digitization partnership between Google Books and Keio University in Japan. The author summarizes the venture’s goals and problems and notes its less-than-satisfactory outcome, particularly in the eyes of the University’s participants. He makes a strong case for understanding and respectfully responding to cultural and institutional differences if MDLs are to succeed beyond a single country’s or region’s population of users.

There is one observation that I could not help making: despite an overall objective treatment of his subject, the author appears to hold a tenaciously critical attitude toward Google Books and its parent company’s approach to MDL development. I cannot say whether this is a personal bias of his or the proper standpoint of someone assessing a powerful for-profit institution on the same grounds as any other dominant player, but a forceful negativity does stand out. Nonetheless, Using Massive Digital Libraries is a skillfully written, concise read (a little over 150 pages long), by a librarian who obviously knows and cares about the field’s pivotal issues. Andrew Weiss argues plausibly that there are unique digital entities called MDLs that bring fundamentally new challenges and possibilities to the library profession. Anyone interested in a very good primer on this nascent topic should check out this publication.