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Thank you very much. I am really very happy that Marty Segal asked me, as the representative of the library community in New York City, to participate in this meeting.
The New York Public Library is not only one of the largest and greatest libraries in the world, but, in addition, a number of its collections are geared specifically to serving the arts communities, to promoting the increased understanding and the preservation of the arts through recordings, films, and hard-copy documents, and also to promoting the creation of new works informed by and inspired by our materials. In fact, I think that the vitality and dynamism of the performing arts in New York would be inconceivable in the absence of our Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, which is the largest such facility in the world, with collections now approaching eight million items.
As we survey the landscape of contemporary American culture, the impact of information and telecommunications technologies is everywhere apparent. Words, sounds, and images have been liberated from the fixed, two-and three-dimensional environments they have inhabited for centuries---environments as known, and therefore as reassuring, as the printed page, the museum wall, the concert hall, or the movie theater. Cultural products are now portable, reproducible, manipulable, retrievable, and accessible to an extent that, as Yogi Berra might have put it, would have Gutenberg turning over in his grave if he were alive today.
To be sure, the present array of technologically based cultural products includes CD-ROMs containing digitized versions of the collections of the National Gallery of Art, and the British Museum, and the multimedia CD-ROM on American history from the Library of Congress, which combines images of photographs, printed and manuscript texts, recorded sound, paintings, and sculpture. These products with greater or lesser degrees of interactivity and greater or lesser quantity of content are best seen, in spite of all the <169>revolutionary<170> auras that surround them, in the great historical tradition of human inventiveness. This tradition progressed from the creation of the alphabet to the invention of moveable type, of engraving, of recorded sound, of photographic and moving images, and, most recently, of the computer.
Each of these technologies is based on a common principle: reproducibility. That is true of the printed page, of the woodcut, of the human voice, and of an image, whether it be still or moving. The mass multiplication of copies of cultural products, and their dispersal as commodities through domestic and international markets, has been a characteristic of Western societies since Gutenberg began it all in the late 15th century. The phenomenon of art as a reproducible commodity has therefore been around for some 500 years.
And successive generations of new technologies have brought the arts to people in dramatically new ways. Each technology has also helped democratize the arts by dispersing them first through the so-called elite population and then through the so-called non-elite population.
At the same time, the business practices that accompanied the <169>commodification<170> of the arts have rarely fully satisfied the requirements, economic or aesthetic, of those responsible for the creation of the primary object itself: the artist. While the concept of intellectual property rights is an old one, copyright law as we know it dates from the end of the 19th century. And, as we recognize all too painfully, the concept is still totally absent, in practice, if not theory, in a number of countries today.
Those of us responsible for managing today's information industry, and those involved in formulating corporate and national policies relative to intellectual property rights, are now engaged in a fairly delicate balancing act. Rights and responsibilities affect at least three communities: first, the creators of artistic expression itself; second, the public that seeks access to the created product; and third, stakeholders who play a role in producing and distributing the product. Members of the latter group include such obvious players as investors, publishers, producers, union members, and so forth.
Speaking only for libraries, which founded the information business and have been in it since the time of ancient Alexandria and Ephesus, I can tell you that the information revolution is presently being played out in four principal spheres. Each is related to computer technology, each is based on the provision of access, and each leads, directly or indirectly, to the creation of new products of human imagination, including new works in the arts.
First, the world's great libraries are nearly all moving towards making the records of their holdings, not so much the content of their holdings but information about them, accessible to readers worldwide through the Internet. Of the world's five largest publicly accessible libraries whose individual collections number in the tens of millions of items, those in New York, Paris, Washington, and London have put the bibliographical records of their printed books online, while Moscow has recently begun this conversion. I would estimate that by approximately the year 2000 those with access to the Internet will be able to peruse, or surf, through records of the book holdings of The New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Biblioth¦que Nationale, and the British Library, which, collectively, own more than 95 million volumes. And if a reader isn't satisfied with these collections, he or she will then be able to access the electronic catalogues of great university libraries, of the great state libraries such as Berlin, as well as national union catalogues. By allowing readers to discover what books exist and where they exist, the Internet is thus making libraries more infinitely dynamic, and turning them into more essential players in the world of information storage and retrieval than ever before.
The second sphere in which technology is transforming libraries is in the field of acquisitions. Since their origins, libraries have based their claim to distinction on the basis of one fact: possession. A library that possessed more things, that possessed items that were more rare or better preserved than those of other libraries, was, ipso facto, a better library. We at the New York Public Library, for example, like to boast not only that we have one of the 47 extant copies of the Gutenberg Bible but that ours was the first one to arrive in North America. But in the age of information technology, possession is rapidly losing its sex appeal. If possession used to be nine-tenths of the law in libraries, <169>access<170> to information is increasingly our byword. The quality of a library, and its distinction, at least in the eyes of its users, now increasingly depends not only on how well that library and its staff provide access to what it owns, but, most especially, to what it doesn't own---that is, to electronically based information that is either mounted locally through licensing agreements or located off-site but available through networks.
Our acquisition budgets are therefore shifting to accommodate not only the actual purchase of materials, something we've always done, but also the purchase of the rights for our users to access other people's materials. Some at the New York Public Library estimate that, by the year 2000, fully ten percent of our acquisitions budget will be devoted to securing access to content of the latter kind, content that will never become part of our permanent collection.
The third sphere in which technology has an impact on libraries follows directly from the second. And that is: what are our obligations to protect the property rights of those who create electronically formatted information products? We have several generations' worth of experience in protecting the copyright status of the printed materials we own. But, as more and more content shifts to electronic form, libraries will be forced to accomplish two goals simultaneously: on the one hand, ensure that such content is available to users at all levels of sophistication and economic means, and, on the other hand, protect the investment made by for-profit information providers by blocking our readers when necessary from downloading data and taking it home with them. The New York Public Library will fulfill these two goals at the new Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) that it is building in the former B. Altman department store building at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue.
And we will fulfill them at our other sites throughout New York.
A fourth, and final, aspect of technology's ability to change libraries has to do with the opportunities it provides for libraries to be entrepreneurial themselves. And here we enter into a field of considerable complexity. A number of libraries are considering how to tap into their collections and use them for product development, something museums have been doing successfully for years. But any foray on the part of a library into this area poses an interesting series of issues, not the least of which is a significant change in attitude towards our collections. In the past we have been a passive repository of materials made available to patrons, who then transformed their contents into new products. We will now have to become more dynamic institutions that assume some responsibility themselves for such transformations, moving from being a passive content repository to active content provider.
Commercial partnerships, such as that between the Vatican library and IBM, are one way of moving here. But whatever direction a library takes, I can assure you that two considerations will, or should, be uppermost in our minds: first, the principal objective of distributing collections, primarily through digitizing them, should be to broaden access. And second, the rights of all those involved in the creation of the original object, i.e. text, photograph, recorded sound, or video, must be protected, not only as a legal obligation but as a moral one as well.
I hope that these comments help frame some aspects of the property rights issues that are before us today. Admittedly, the perspective is from that of the research library community. But given the central role we intend libraries to play in the national information infrastructure, the issues facing us, and our solutions to them, obviously fit into a broader picture of technology's relationship to creativity and to the arts. Do we have all the answers? Of course not. Are we on the way to finding them? Obviously.
Thank you very much.