“The eighteenth-century ideal of spreading light may seem archaic today, but it can acquire a twenty-first-century luster if one associates it with the Internet, which transmits messages at virtually no cost. And if Internet enthusiasm sounds suspiciously idealistic, one can extend the chain of associations to a key concept of modern economics—that of a public good. Public goods such as clean air, efficient roads, hygienic sewage disposal, and adequate schooling benefit the entire citizenry, and one citizen’s benefit does not diminish that of another. Public goods are not assets in a zero-sum game, but they do carry costs—up-front costs, usually paid through taxation, at the production end of the services and facilities that the public enjoys as users. The Jeffersonian ideal of access to knowledge as a public good does not mean that knowledge has no cost. We enjoy freedom of information, but information is not free. Someone had to pay for Jefferson’s taper.
“I stress that point, because I want to offer a work-in-progress report on the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and to argue that it is a feasible, affordable project as well as an opportunity to realize the Enlightenment ideals on which our country was founded.
“Although fantasies about a mega-meta-macro library go back to the ancients, the possibility of actually constructing one is recent. It dates from the creation of the Internet (1974) and the Web (1991). Google demonstrated that the new technology could be harnessed to create a new kind of library, one that, in principle, could contain all the books in existence. But Google Book Search is a story of a good idea gone bad. As first conceived, it promised to do what Google does best: search for pertinent information. Google would digitize millions of books provided for free from research libraries, and users would be able to locate material in them by entering key words and examining short snippets called up from the database.”
From Robert Darnton’s article in the New York Review of Books, Jefferson’s Taper: A National Digital Library (full-text for subscribers only)