Net Buzz with Richard Wiggins

East Lansing, Michigan
A Virtual Library with Empty Shelves

By Richard Wiggins

ice President Gore likes to depict a vision of a little schoolgirl sitting at her home computer in rural Tennessee. In Gore's vision, the girl can locate and read any book in the Library of Congress – all via the Internet.

This is quite a noble dream, but it's also a very ambitious one. Members of the library community who have contemplated how much work it would take to digitize and make available online every word of every page of every book in the Library of Congress realize what a mind-boggling amount of effort this would entail. Some consider the amount of effort almost incalculable.

On a more realistic scale, a number of institutions have worked to digitize for online delivery more limited collections of content – for instance, the works of Mark Twain. The people who spend their working days digitizing print content for delivery online know the amount of effort such projects entail. They welcome the support of advocates such as Vice President Gore, but they realize it's going to take a lot of time and toil to make substantial full text collections available online. Still, advocates of virtual libraries are delighted when each new project take its first step on that journey of a thousand miles.

Last week a small article in the New York Times caught my eye. The article was labeled as an Associated Press piece with no byline. It described a new presence on the Web, in part by saying:

Wow! A virtual library with 40,000 items would be amazing stuff. This would be something that schoolchildren and undergraduates and even scholars of the Presidency could use. It would also be a very useful example for Al Gore to trumpet as he touts his vision of that little girl in Tennessee finding real content via the Internet.

And the White House is apparently excited about this project. Hillary Rodham Clinton hosted a White House ceremony that was sent out via videoconferencing to several sites in real time. Mrs. Clinton proclaimed:

Pretty heady stuff! (One is reminded of Lincoln's somewhat humbler assessment of the Gettysburg Address: "The world will little note nor long remember…") Excited about this new library, I zipped downstairs and typed www.firstladies.org into my Web browser. A little bit of poking around revealed that this virtual library wasn't what it seemed to be at all. In fact, a cynic might say this was a virtual library with empty shelves.

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