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Digitizing on Demand

Lately I was talking with Tom Peters, Center for Library Initiatives, "CIC", about digitizing on demand. What we were discussing is using same digital infrastructure for accessing print materials now used in interlibrary loan applied to a much more general delivery mode for print collections. In this scenario library staff fulfill reader requests, imaging and transmitting print pages. Then the paper “leaf master” is returned to the shelf and the image files discarded.

Tom remarked how the digitization on demand scenario converges with a current increasing concern for security of the print collections. In this scenario the lesser used materials can be withdrawn and secured in purpose built storage while access is provide by the imaging pod.

As for increasing vandalization of print; well...duh! As patrons increasingly approach the library from an on-line reading mode they will carry assumptions over to the use of the print materials. Post-its are analog expressions of hyper links and lost pages are only normal when considered from the perspective of a reading mode that assumes transience and disposability of content.

But back to the premise of on-demand digital conversion and delivery. It will work, as interlibrary loan service demonstrates, because the delivery mode breaks up the bibliographical unit of the book. It breaks up the book down to page and to the key word. No need to look for a shipping container for the whole paper book.

It will also work because the image files are discarded daily; flushed from the system every night. This is not a process of conversion. It is not even a process of systematic use of collections. It is an absolutely transient delivery for a readership that expects such transience. This delivery process represents ultra short term preservation. From capture to transmission to receipt the preservation responsibility extends for seconds. The longer term preservation is assured by returning the “leaf master” to safe storage.

Or, if this loss of capture work is such a tragedy just put a computer in every book. Larry Smarr say's that soon we will have a networked world in which the number of personal computers will soon double, to one billion. Moreover, there will soon be three billion Internet-connected cell phones — and, more important, as many as 16 billion Internet-connected computers embedded in everything from automobiles to toasters. So why not in books, embeddded chips that will store any pages scanned?

If Larry is right the whole network is going to start thinking on its own anyway. So it may be of interest to the network to perceive all the queries to all the paper books.

Is this a library service?

Well, it is a service of a print library to any degree that it wishes to serve an on-line reading mode. The point here is that the composite, on-line reading mode is not served by the systematic digital conversion and digital storage of traditional print bibliographical units. The print reading mode would be served by such a conversion...but that is another topic. The composite, on-line reading mode is chasing particular queries that transcend the print units and has no time to pause with the organization of the print collections.

But what about the obstacle of the on-demand or on the fly delivery across the analog to digital divide? What about the “labor intensive” activity?

Librarianship is labor intensive, building civilizations is labor intensive, bookbinding is labor intensive. We are bias in our immediate avoidance of any activity because it is “labor intensive”. Other cultures, other societies have a much more positive and probably wise approach to labor intensive activity. The question is what is the merit of the process of maintaining the infrastructure of stored and transmitted knowledge.

90% of infrastructure is invisible. I discern a post digital brick & mortar scenario here. Not so much an imaging service as a glimpsing service by a preservation department managing digital access to the bound print collections.

Tom Peters likes the idea of on-demand digital delivery. It addresses a conundrum of the move toward a CIC virtual or cooperative digital library by adding to that agenda assured local delivery of local collections to online readers who are mostly local. It is a method for each library to deliver to itself.

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