Reading notes for Legal Rights and the Future of Digital Libraries

Joseph E. Stiglitz -- "Intellectual Property Rights and Wrongs"

I've been thinking a lot about intellectual property for the other class I'm taking, Kip Currier's Legal Issues - Copyright class. So yes, I agree with Stiglitz's contention that sharing intellectual property is crucial for advances in medicine, science, technology, and other research. The author raises some of the key issues we've been considering about how abuses of legal power may impede innovation merely in order to benefit corporations or other legal institutions. As a prospective digital librarian, I of course tend to favor open access to research and information. But in the last few months I've become aware of many unfortunately thorny issues that librarians must face in attempting to provide information to the public.

Clifford Lynch -- "Where Do We Go from Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries"

Preservation concerns are also something I've been thinking about lately, with regard to both physical and digital materials. One angle of this article that I found interesting was the idea that long-term preservation of intellectual property is too important to allow only librarians to be entrusted with it, since they may be considered only "one group among a broad array of stakeholders." I'm glad to see that funding for digitization initiatives has increased over the last decade or so, thereby "validating" the mission and forming communities among diverse organizations, as the article points out. And indeed, the article reminds us that digital collection creation and management are essential to a huge range of industries and institutions, such as (just for example) engineering firms, homeland security, museums, personal archives, schools, laboratories, and historical societies.

I appreciate the author's effort to consider a "long time horizon perspective" in integrating digital information management technologies for multiple purposes across people's lifetimes. As a side note, this makes me think of the excellent book "The Clock of the Long Now" by Stewart Brand, which I read as an optional assignment for Dr. Richard Cox's class in archival ethics. The book was a fascinating meditation on ultra-long-term preservation. Highly recommended!