Publishing House Research

Steve Greechie's Interview with Dame Lynne Brindley
Director of The British Library
July tenth, 2008

SC: Library science is such an interesting field! My goal is to talk with the leaders in the international library field.

LB: There's probably never been a more interesting time to be thinking about what great libraries are - and where they're going.

SC: There is, as I recall, a curse that says "May you live in interesting times". It must be difficult for someone in your position to maneuver through all the vagaries and the problems we face.

LB: But, as you say, it's interesting. And if one isn't up for a challenge one shouldn't be in for some of these big jobs.

SC: If I could begin with something you said at the CILIP conference . You talked about creating a balance between user - created content like Wikipedia and traditional sources. How do we make a balance when it's a question of sourcing? How can we compromise on our need to have exact and reliable sources?

LB: Well, I don't think the two things are mutually exclusive, because there is quite a lot of evidence that users do become experts. There are expert users and there are expert professionals. So quite a lot of people who are creating content have a vested interest and deep expertise in what they're doing, driven by their own motivations. It's rather analogous to the fact that if you have a medical condition, it's in your interest to find out a good deal about it - and you probably end up knowing more about it than your doctor does. If you look at the users of the British Library and our readers, many of them are world experts in their field. If we can build communities of experts and communities of our users - whether it's around a discipline, a sub - discipline or a particular format - then we can augment our expertise and therefore our content. So I see the two as the way forword.

SC: It's the question of motivation that worries me. We know that a lot of the material on Wikipedia was placed by the subject. We knew that a lot of the business material, for example, has been written by the corporations, and can't be trusted. How do we do that screening?

LB: I think that's a separate issue. I have never argued for a sort of Open Wikipedia model. Most of the contributions on Wikipedia are done by people who make expert contributions, so I don't think that it's as wide open as it might appear. The model I quite like is of a sort of light touch mediation, so that you don't automatically throw up everything. The role of the information intermediary - the library person, if you like - is to authenticate the quality of material, or at least to indicate its source and its provenance, in a sort of peer - review kind of way. That is an adaptation of a traditional skill set into the digital age - and that's what I quite like about it.

We've got a great example of that at the moment in some of the work we're doing on sounds and dialects. You see, we have a database, Sounds Familiar, the greatest collection of dialects - UK, regional dialects. We have put this out on to our website with a map and invited schools to contribute from each of their areas - particularly in areas where we're not so well covered. So they're going out to the schools, taking recordings and so on. Now, we don't put all that up immediately, but we take it in and our dialects and sound experts take a look at it.

The general point here is that research is becoming more democratic. It is not just the preserve any more of those who have been predefined as academics or researchers. We at the British library are very thoughtful about this for all the reasons you're suggesting, but we're also opening up as a library to the social reality that more people are interested in researching. We're seeing that in a range of people now who want to use our reading rooms.

SC: So that sounds very hopeful. You're implying that it'll improve the quality of documentation of culture.

LB: I didn't quite say that. I'm implying that it is a positive and unstoppable area. I'm implying a new kind of role for library professionals. There's a concern around questions of new forms of information literacy - the critical thinking skills and assessment skills needed to assess for ourselves what is important, what is rubbish, what is propaganda, what has got particular corporate bias, etc...

We did a recent study on the information behaviour of the Google generation, which came out with some high - level messages. This generation who've never known life before the internet, who are our readers of the future of course, have mostly great technology skills but have quite patchy information skills - because they use the search engines a lot, they bounce around, they go very broad, they struggle to go deep. They don't have critical research skills to enable them to critique what they're finding. We're doing some major thought leadership on this. This reinterpretation of what are the skills necessary in this new environment is a very big theme and of big importance for the future role of professional librarians.

But it's not what we used to call user education. It is a much bigger theme of media literacy and critical thinking skills - not just trusting what Google gets you. I think you have to triangulate these things, at the very least. If you're going to open up your creation, you've got to have other mechanisms for mediating them.

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SC: If we could talk about intellectual property rights: are we loosing the battle for fair use - to use the American term - in light of The World Trade Organization's protection of - quote - "the creator's rights"?

LB: That is a huge question. The honest answer is "I don't know". There is, as you know, a tremendous fight which will, I think, go on for so time. One sees a dialogue of the deaf.

The big vested interests from the entertainment industry and the music industry - it's arguable that they've lost protectionism a little, and that is moving into the publishing industry. The newspaper industry is floundering - they're all floundering around sustainable, new, digital business models. Quite a lot of that noise is not about protection of the creator, so much as protection of the producer, and I think that will go on.

At the other extreme, you're seeing major trends in open source software. You have the open access movement for publishing, which at one extreme disintermediates the publishing industry. The commercial publishing industry has become less relevant for the dissemination of research materials. You see companies opening up some of their content, and opening up some of their software problems to be solved by the masses - a kind of participative creation. You see huge examples of innovation through openness and through fair use.

So, I think we're in the middle of an extraordinary period where all of this is being battled out and people are working in 'parallel universes' - open and closed. We've had in the UK a major review of intellectual property and copyright, and The British Library has been leading a lot of the debate. Our position is that we should seek to strike a balance.

Now, that's easy to say, and arguably much of the devil is what you mean by the details of that balance. But there is significant evidence that the fair dealing - and our fair dealing is much more limited than your fair use - supports creativity, education and research. We need to continue with those rights under the copyright law in the digital environment.

Are we winning that? I'm not sure. There are counter - arguments to arguing for extended term - particularly in music, but also for other things. But I think that would be a loss - a loss for research, but also a loss for that kind of innovational creativity that is underpinning the creative industries.

So I think that's where we're at. We have evidence that a lot of the licenses that are signed for digital content are giving lesser rights than would be under traditional fair dealing. We're rather worried that contract law is superseding the fair dealing arrangements, and we're arguing against that. But on the other hand, even quite a lot of commercial companies are arguing that some of the technical protection measures - the DRM's - are not sustainable - those protection mechanisms and things like that which prevent us doing what is a core statutory function around long - term presentation of digital material.

SC: So does the answer lie in technology or in legislation?

LB: I don't think the answer lies in technology. Legislation is some part of it, of course. The legislative framework is tight enough; it should not be tighter.

The answer is partly in more imaginative business models. The music example is a good one. You have a generation that is used to downloading, wants to do creative things, and probably doesn't wittingly want to break the law. And experimentation is going on; the music industry is finding a way through some of this. There's a lot more money being made by live performance, by bands putting up free stuff. There have been some experiments about voluntary payments, and download payments. I think we've just got years of experimentation with business models.

[For more information on intellectual property, see:
Intellectual Property: The British Library's Perspective
Dame Lynn Brindley aippointed to Strategic Advisory Boad for Intellectual Property
'Digital is not Different' say 93% of UK researchers]

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SC: How does the British Library see itself in the international community?

LB: I can answer that on several levels. We are without dispute one of the greatest libraries in the world. In terms of those professional challenges, we work internationally with the best. We partner with the best of the great libraries, and we work with international private sector partners - we do a great deal of work with Microsoft, for example.

We're a library of the world and for the world. "British Library", in a way, is a misnomer, because our connections are universal. Most of our activity, of course, has a UK focus, but it is of the world.

We have several strands of international activity. One is doing work to ensure the preservation of endangered cultures through their oral heritage, or through their written heritage. We have a big grant program funded by philanthropic donation to preserve those cultures.

And we have some great projects to reunite digitally pieces of heritage and documentary culture that are separated physically. Let me give you a couple of examples. We fund - raised about a million pounds to do a project around the Codex Sinaiticus - it's the earliest New Testament, from the fourth century. We have most of it here, and some of it is in St Petersburg, at the National Library there. Some it is in Leipzig, and some of it is in St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai. We aim to bring the whole thing together digitally for the world.

Another project one of large - scale importance is around the international Dunhuang Project. All the manuscripts in the Dunhuang cave were separated. We have a lot of them, the French have a lot, the Russians have a lot, and the Chinese National Library has a lot. Again, we're digitizing all of those and uniting them on the web.

SC: Have were reached the point yet where the world library collection is genuinely one international library collection? Has inter - library loan and digitization brought us that for yet?

LB: No, I think we're a long way from that. There are a lot of pieces of that work. For example, we're working with a European consortium to reveal the cultural and scientific heritage of all the national libraries of Europe. There are lots of jigsaw pieces being created which are gradually building the world digital library. But are we there? No, not in my lifetime. It's just massive.

SC: So it's a matter of retrospective conversion.

LB: Well, there are two levels. We have 150 million items in the British Library. To reveal that is a massive task. The funding to do that on a sustainable basis, not just to digitize but to have great user interfaces and to digitally preserve that material forever, is massive. Digital preservation is one of these big topics that we work on internationally. We're leading a European project, but we work globally on those challenges. So I think we have a lot to do on the retrospective digitization.

Interviews