[ Silence ]

>> Welcome and thanks for coming this afternoon.

I'm Dan Rockmore, Chair of the Department of Mathematics here

at Dartmouth and also Director

of the William H. Neukom Institute

for Computational Science.

On behalf of the college, the institute, and the friends

of Dartmouth library, it's my pleasure to be able

to introduce Professor Robert Darnton today

of Harvard University who will be speaking to us

on the Digital Public Library of America and the Digital Future.

This is the third lecture on our leading voices

in higher education series and as moreover,

the Inaugural Donoho Colloquium.

The Donoho Colloquia will be an ongoing series

of public lectures aimed in increasing awareness

of the many important and sometimes surprising places

in which computational ideas appear.

This is a central piece of the larger mission

of the Neukom Institute whose aim is to support

and integrate computational thinking

and computational ideas throughout Dartmouth.

These lectures are made possible by a generous gift from David,

Miriam, and Dan Donoho in honor of Dan's graduation as a member

of the class of 2006 and where Dan's brainchild in fact

to honor that graduation.

Dan is at present in the Emergency Room working

through his anesthesiology rotation,

don't be worried it's not in the Emergency Room.

But we are fortunate to have David and Miriam

who moved heaven and earth to get here and--

so thank you very much for coming in for your gift.

[ Applause ]

When we looked to initiate the Donoho Colloquium,

I immediately thought of Robert Darnton as the first lecturer.

He's a leading authority on the French enlightenment

in the history of the book but it was his many cogently argued

and beautifully written New York Review essays on the creation

of a Digital Public Library of America

that made him a natural choice as the first Donoho lecturer.

His arguments mix historical anecdote with close legal

and moral reasoning and are masterful displays of passion

and advocacy and careful analysis.

He makes clear the challenges and possibilities inherent

in such an endeavor as well

as the central role the computational

and digital technology play in the story.

Now, the idea of such a public resource also has an important

Dartmouth connection as one of the first public calls

for a national computer-based library can be found

in a lecture by former math professor and 13th president

of Dartmouth, John Kemeny.

Given just over 50 years ago at a conference convened

to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of MIT.

In his lecture, a library for 2000 A.D., Kemeny advocated

for a national research library.

A central resource for the nation's research community.

Kemeny argued that the sheer projected volume

of textual resources and the attendant problems

of information search

and retrieval would require digitized storage and access.

Now, I can't help myself from showing you a table

from Kemeny's talk that he used to illustrate the kinds

of problems he anticipated.

So this is what he viewed

as the big problem in search [laughter].

So, what you saw is 2 hours and 27 minutes and 45 seconds

to find a book so the walk to the library, finding the card

and the catalogue, up the stairs,

discovering the book is missing [laughter] would--

the majority of time spent waiting for Professor S

to return from lunch [laughter] but I have to say,

I love this for so many different reasons

but I also know it's true

because Professor S was my dear friend, Laurie Snell.

So I know that is [laughter] this is a true story.

For those of you who know Laurie,

this is perfectly believable.

So Kemeny's lecture is simultaneously present

and of it's time as he gives us a detailed vision

for an electronic library but one deeply rooted

and tape drives and phone connections.

Great advances in technology as well as computer science,

mathematics, and statistics have made possible the much more

ambitious goal that is a Digital Public Library of America.

From conception to execution,

Professor Darnton has led the charge for its creation.

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor

at Harvard and Director of the Harvard University Library,

he is a Harvard graduate, a Rhodes Scholar,

a former reporter for the New York Times, and was a professor

on the Princeton History Faculty from 1968 until 2007

when he returned to Harvard.

He has held numerous visiting positions and is a member

of the boards of many prestigious institutions

including the New York Public Library.

He is the author of many scholarly essays

and books including the Forbidden Bestsellers

of Pre-Revolutionary France

which was a National Book Critics Circle Award winner.

Professor Darnton is the recipient of numerous honors

and prizes including a MacArthur Fellowship and most recently,

a National Humanities Medal received just a few weeks ago

from President Obama.

In the words of the citation, Professor Darnton has a quote,

"Determination to make knowledge accessible to everyone."

As an author, he has illuminated the world of Enlightenment

and Revolutionary France, and as a librarian, he has endeavored

to make his vision for a comprehensive national library

of digitized books a reality, end quote.

We look forward to his sharing of that vision

with us this afternoon so please join me

in welcoming our first Donoho lecturer,

Professor Robert Darnton.

[ Applause ]

>> Thank you Dan.

Well, thank you I'm delighted to be here.

It's good to see snow, it's the first snow I've seen this

winter practically.

But I'm especially honored to be giving the first

of the Donoho lectures and I'm delighted

that you could come yourselves.

I think that Neukom Institute is a good thing

and I think probably, a lot of you care about books

so that makes me feel good.

They can be digitized, they can be printed on paper

but they are actually doing rather well,

even the old fashioned printed codex.

Believe it or not, this year,

more books will be published worldwide than ever before.

1 million new titles almost all of them in print.

It's amazing.

So when people tell you the book is dead, just shake your head

in disbelief, the book is not dead.

It makes me think often of one of my favorite graffiti

and it's actually in the men's room of Firestone Library

in Princeton, you know, and you may have seen one like this.

It begins, "God is dead," signed Nietzsche [laughter]

and then underneath Nietzsche is, "Dead,"

signed God [laughter].

The book is absolutely not dead.

And I think there are a lot of misconceptions actually

about the digital and the analog as if they were at war

with one another, you know, as if they occupied opposite

and inimical positions on some kind of technological spectrum.

One thing we've learn from the history of books is

that one medium does not displace another.

Believe it or not, after the invention or reinvention

of movable type by Gutenberg, manuscript publishing increased

and it continued to thrive for 3 centuries after Gutenberg.

It was often cheaper to hire scribes to copy out a whole book

for an addition of less than 100 copies.

So people are publishing manuscript books well

into 18th centuries, some even in the 19th century.

And I think today, we all understand

that the radio did not kill the newspaper,

and TV didn't kill the radio, and the internet didn't kill TV,

we live in a, I think, an environment of media

that gets richer and more complicated

but it's certainly not one in which it's just zero-sum games

and the printed book is gone.

That does not mean, however, that all is well in the world

of printed books, I mean there are a lot

of very unhappy publishers, authors, booksellers,

and even at the occasional librarian, I think, Jeff.

There is pressure all over the place

and that's really the subject of my talk.

So I'd like to begin if I may by quoting Thomas Jefferson,

the devil can quote Thomas Jefferson but I like to do

so anyhow and I've done this in other settings

because of his famous remark in a letter that he wrote

in 1813 developing a metaphor about light.

So you should think of the enlightenment, light in the form

of a candle which he'd call the taper.

So I'll give you the full quote

and I hope we will all feel enlightened and then I will try

to take it from there.

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible

than all others of exclusive property, it is the action

of the thinking power called an idea,

which an individual may exclusively possess as long

as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged,

it forces itself into the possession of every one,

and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less,

because every other possesses the whole of it.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself

without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine,

receives light without darkening me."

Now, you might think that the 18th century ideal

of spreading light, enlightenment, sounds archaic,

in fact it may sound suspiciously professorial.

We professors like to invoke Thomas Jefferson

and I especially like to invoke people like Condor [inaudible]

who was all for spreading light and who is convinced

that there would be indefinite progress,

thanks to the publication of books.

But that can sound naive and the point

of course is what then could have been

or actually was merely Utopian is now possible thanks

to modern technology, the internet.

Still, having said that and probably a lot

of people would agree on the face of it,

it can nonetheless sound Utopian so I would

like to invoke another kind of American sprit

that can do pragmatic, no-nonsense, business plan type

of spirit in order to argue my case.

The point is that you can invoke even economists

to develop this sort of an argument.

After all, one of the most hard-boiled concepts

of modern economics is that of a public good.

Public goods such as clean air, efficient roads,

hygienic sewage disposal, and adequate schooling,

benefit the entire citizenry and when citizens benefit,

does not diminish that of another.

Public goods are not assets in a zero-sum game.

But they do carry costs, upfront costs usually paid

for by taxation and this occurs at the production end

of services and facilities that the public enjoys.

So the Jeffersonian ideal of access to knowledge

as a public good does not mean that knowledge is costless.

We enjoy freedom of information, but of course,

information is not free.

Someone had to pay for Jefferson's taper.

Now, I would like to emphasize that point

because few people have any idea of what it actually costs

to provide them with the information

that they consult every day on the internet.

Instead, they complain about information overload.

My daughter, for example, laments the fact that,

as she puts it, "The amount

of medical knowledge doubles every 2 years."

And yet she knows nothing about another tendency that undercuts

that doubling, namely commercialization.

According to several reliable sources,

the amount of research published

in medical journals actually does almost double

over 2-year periods.

The US library of medicine reports that the number

of medical journals increased from 3,472 in the year 2000

to 4,866 in the year 2010.

And the number-- excuse--