Librarians of Europe, unite!

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, is raising a hue and cry about the new American hegemon, Google Print. This Internet behemoth, by providing information freely across the globe, poses an epistemological threat to the Continent:

Here we have the risk of a crushing domination by America in defining the idea that later generations will have of the world [...] the criteria of choice will be powerfully marked (even if we contribute ourselves, naturally without sulking, to these riches) by the perspective which is that of the Anglo-Saxons, with its specific coloration with respect to the diversity of civilizations.

Writing this in Le Monde, Jeanneney urges Brussels to mobilize to counter this threat with (surprise!) a bureaucratic solution:

It's by going forward with public funds that we will guarantee to citizens and to researchers -- providing needed expenses as taxpayers and not as consumers -- protection against the perverse effects of profit-seeking hidden behind the appearance of disinterested service.

Observing all of this at Language Log (which is the source of the preceding translations), Mark Liberman is amused:

As someone with a couple of decades of experience in negotiating information-sharing arrangements with European agencies in general, and French ones in particular, I'm enjoying a quiet chuckle at the thought of the "protection against perverse effects" that the people serving in such entities can be trusted to provide.

I think that I wish M. Jeanneney well in his campaign. An intercontinental competition to see whose library resources can be more interesting, attractive and open -- how could that be bad? (Well, since I asked: if all European digital library funding, along with various special IPR privileges, were to become the exclusive territory of an agency that is skilled in protecting its mandate, but sclerotic or incompetent in carrying it out. Could this happen? Let's say that there are precedents... It's not only in the private sector that more selfish motives can hide behind the appearance of disinterested service.)

I would add that it might be worth M. Jeanneney's time to consider the possibility that American cultural power is so great precisely because the USA generally avoids bureaucratic solutions; American organizations have to build market share in order to survive. American cultural production is of questionable quality but undeniable reach as a result.

| Posted by Wilson at 13:19 Central | TrackBack
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