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And, at the same time, the information resources available on the Internet are growing at an accelerated pace as the U.S. government and international organizations such as the United Nations and NATO open up their files for free access. Their Internet sites include up-to-date reference and research information that previously was very difficult to find and expensive to obtain, simply because paper is expensive.
For instance, Supreme Court decisions 1989-1994, which are now available for free in electronic form on the Internet, amount to about 22 Mbytes of information. At about 800 pages per Mbyte, that amounts to over 17,000 pages, which at five cents per page, would cost $850 to photocopy (not including all the time wasted).
How can and should schools and libraries take advantage of the riches available on the Internet?
A lot depends on what kind of access you have to the Internet. If you have Mosaic and Worldwide Web, with a fast connection (a T-1 line or ISDN), and numerous PCs, Macintoshes, and/or workstations to accommodate all comers, then you can maintain a "home page" with pointers to the best sites and starting points and search engines. Then there's no need for you to download material for local access. In that case, the Internet itself is a vast extension of your library. And, for the experienced user, the Internet becomes an extension of his or her own mind. It can be quicker and easier to retrieve a text from Australia or Germany than to walk ten feet and take a book off a shelf.
Those of us who do not have that luxury, need to develop tactics to make the most of what we do have.
In most cases, our Internet connections are slow, and we have only one or just a few modem lines. That means that if one person is busy downloading a huge file, others have to wait to get access.
In most cases, we do not have Mosaic and the Worldwide Web to enable us to smoothly click our way through cyberspace. Rather we rely on printed manuals to explain the older Internet commands and addresses, and to help us navigate through ftp and gopher directories. So even though the information we want is out there and for free, it may take hours to find the material we want when we want it. And those of us who are experienced find ourselves spending lots of time answering the numerous questions of novices.
In most cases, too, we don't have full Internet access. We can only do email, or if we can do ftp and gopher, the disk space allotted to us is very limited; so once we've found the text, it may turn out to be too large for us to download it.
That means we need to make choices about what information we want to make available locally and what information to rely on the Internet for.
If you have good enough access, fast enough connectivity, enough disk space in your Internet account, and time to spare, you can and should systematically download onto IBM/Macintosh diskettes the material that you know will be needed repeatedly. Your selection might include such items as the CIA World Factbook, ERIC Digests and Supreme Court decisions, as well as literary works.
If you aren't able to do that, you should consider purchasing diskettes with that same information from a service such as ours (PLEASE COPY THIS DISK).
In either case, as you build your own local electronic library on diskettes, keep one set of masters in a safe place, and make a set of backup diskettes which you make generally available. Encourage students and library patrons to make copies onto their own blank diskettes. They can then do their reading and research on their own machines, at their leisure, and without tying up your limited resources.
Public machines with access to the Internet can and should be dedicated to the use of people who are doing unique on-line research. For them, you would want to provide a good set of Internet reference guides (printed books, as well as books on diskette) and access to experienced users (perhaps a cadre of student volunteers) to help point them in the right direction and reduce search time. You also might want to keep a notebook where users can share useful tips with one another.
And when, in the course of their research, people find and download large files that could be useful to others, encourage them to make a copy and add it to your local electronic library.
There are many possible ways to build and run your local electronic library.
Just remember that if you have limited resources for Internet connection, you don't want those lines constantly busy with people repeatedly retrieving the same documents, or downloading large files. The Internet should be used for unique searches, and the library should build a collection of the best and most useful material on diskettes.
I am not a lawyer. I'm a firm believer in freedom of expression and in the importance of making public information freely available to the public. I'm concerned that doubts regarding copyright status of material on the Internet could seriously restrict the systematic use of it by libraries. And I believe that if people deal fairly and openly with one another, treat one another with respect, and exercise due caution and common sense, we can all get along well together without the need for lawyers.
As a general rule, material published before 1918 is now in the public domain. But translations and scholarly editions of such works which were published since then may still be under copyright protection. Also compilations/anthologies of otherwise public domain material can be copyrighted.
Today, you can scan a book with relatively inexpensive equipment and software, putting it into an electronic form which you can then distribute on CD ROM or diskette, or send by email, or post in an electronic bulletin board system, or in ftp, gopher, or www files. And it is a relatively easy matter to upload from CD ROM to the Internet or download from the Internet to diskette. And some ftp and gopher sites let users add material to their archives with little or no oversight. When you find a book on the Internet, it may be virtually impossible to determine how the electronic came into existence and what paper edition it derives from.
To further complicate matters, the courts have been ambiguous regarding whether the mechanical act of scanning gives any rights to the person or company does that work.
As a practical matter, for one-time, personal use, these legal complications probably make no difference. But if a school or library begins to systematically download material and encourages widespread copying of it, that's a different matter.
Does that mean that a school or library that wants to build a local electronic library of diskettes with material from the Internet should limit itself to just government information? No, but someone in authority should review and approve material before it becomes part of the "official" collection. And that reviewer should make sure that the source is known and trusted.
A recent query from a blind reader in Canada brought this point home to me.
She was interested in building an electronic library, as described above, and was asking for advice. She also was kind enough to point me to a gopher site which I hadn't mentioned in this newsletter and which has an extremely rich collection of classic literary texts. Starting at nstn.ca, she had wandered through gopher space (selecting 5, 3, 5, 1, 14, and 3) and found herself with a set of material which she believed was "from Vermont".
I followed the path she had indicated, and indeed arrived at that same collection. Using the command "=" I found out that the site where it was located was indeed gopher.vt.edu. Going back to my system prompt, the command gopher gopher.vt.edu brought me to their main gopher site, which turned out to be Virginia Tech, not Vermont. And using the port number 10010 brought me directly to the electronic texts.
Since most of the material there is not available from the major sites of literary electronic texts, which historically are very careful about copyright matters (Gutenberg, wiretap, Oxford, and Libellus), I sent a query to the gopher administrator at Virginia Tech. She replied that the material had been uploaded from a CD ROM which they got from Walnut Creek. She also gave me their phone number. I contacted Walnut Creek and found out that they had not copyrighted that CD ROM, and that they do not believe that the act of scanning a public domain text should give anyone special rights to it. But that particular CD ROM ("the desk top library") is no longer for sale. It contained materials that they had obtained from the Internet, not by scanning. And they withdrew it for "legal reasons."
Walnut Creek pointed out that they also publish a CD ROM of texts from the Gutenberg Project, and that they have had no problems with that one. (If you would like information about their products, you can reach them at velte@cdrom.com ).
One could take the position that even if a compilation is copyrighted, if the individual items are in the public domain, then you should be able to make free use of them individually. But until the courts decide whether the work of scanning and proofreading gives anyone special rights to a particular electronic version, libraries would be well advised to make sure they know its origin before encouraging systematic copying.
I myself am an author. And the fact remains that most authors only receive token sums for their work and would welcome an opportunity to reach a wider audience.
Many of us are caught up in some Horatio Alger myth. A handful of writers make it big, and the rest of us put up with a system that makes it very difficult for us to ever reach an audience, on the hope that we will someday be lucky.
Keep in mind that I am not talking about computer documentation, or the kind of writing that corporations pay you to do. I am talking about the publishing industry -- articles and books that you write not on contract, but on the hope that you will be able to sell them to a publisher.
Have you been published? And if so, was the amount you were paid in any way commensurate with the work that went into it?
My main message is that the ability to distribute electronic texts over the Internet changes the rules of the publishing game. Don't take it for granted that the old rules and old model still apply. If you sell a book, hang onto the electronic rights (so you can do with them what you will in the future) or make the publisher pay something substantial for them (above what they would normally pay you).
You can make money selling the paper print rights and make the electronic version available for free to reach a broader audience. Or you can use the Internet to give new life to a book of yours which publishers have dropped from print. Or you can give first life to a work that dozens or hundreds of people need or would enjoy but which would never be published traditionally because it wouldn't sell enough copies.
I strongly believe in the rights of authors. I also believe that authors have been abused by publishers for centuries, and that this new technology gives us interesting options we never had before.
I'm honored to be here with people who helped make the Internet what it is today and who will shape its future.
My videotape is a quick look at what is happening today with Mosaic and the Worldwide Web. It avoids talk about highways and distance, and tries to show the immediacy of a user's experience.
Mosaic brings the world to your desktop. It makes the resources of the Internet feel like an extension of your own mind.
And if you have something to say or show, the Worldwide Web lets you open up and invite a global audience to share your creations and follow the threads of your thought.
This environment feels like the grand concourse of a global mall, where millions congregate to learn and share experiences and to do business.
The Internet has long been a great way to meet people -- to hear all views and to have your say. It has been a pioneer environment of sharing and caring, where strangers often help one another, with no expectation of payment or reward.
Today, some people on the Internet are frightened by the rapid growth and change and the coming of commerce. They talk about a land rush, and barbed wire, and the end of the open range.
But the Internet is not a limited, fixed space to be carved up by competing commercial interests.
Rather, it is a different dimension, where you can be everywhere at once, without moving. Every individual and every company that connects to the Internet expands and enriches it, and at the same time becomes part of the Internet and is changed by it.
Let's welcome the growth and grow with it. Let's help shape a future that continues to amaze and inspire us all.
Published by Samizdat Express, 213 Deerfield Lane, Orange, CT 06477. (203) 553-9925. seltzer@samizdat.com
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