This last week, I had the pleasure of meeting with folks at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). This is one of the nation’s outstanding public institutions, responsible for PubMed; a comprehensive collection and licensing program in journals and texts; and unique, historically important and vital archival materials.

One of the NLM’s missions is to serve as a collection of record for the product of scientific research and (in their case) health sciences knowledge and exploration.

Historically, libraries fulfilled this aim by acquiring and carefully storing works in their physical form, paper, which is relatively costly to produce (compared to replicating digital copies), not easily distributable, and therefore rare. Of course, as our accumulated knowledge, research, speculations, and culture grew, achieving the purpose of what we know as the modern library required the construction of increasingly large buildings to house the printed material and the development of a highly trained staff to catalog and describe it.

With more of our research becoming an electronic record, there have been new efforts to understand the requirements for its necessary preservation. There have been some notable initiatives that are essentially joint ventures between the publishing and library communities to construct preservation repositories for e-journal content; these include the Mellon-supported Portico repository and the LOCKSS system. These collaborations share costs and include provisions for libraries to preserve access to these materials if their publishing partners exit the continued production and maintenance of scholarly literature.

It was disturbing to hear at the Library that increasingly, the largest publishers of STM (Scientific/Technical/Medical) material are asserting that they provide the repository of record for their journals, and they have little interest in participating or continuing to participate in library alliances to preserve this content. Essentially, these publishers are telling the entire public, “Trust us. We have an economic interest in this material, and we are its shepherds, and we will preserve it for you.”

If this perspective is becoming mainstreamed in this publishing community, it must be denounced as a disastrously shortsighted one. It is an abnegation of our responsibilities as a culture to permit the preservation of the world’s hard-earned record of knowledge and speculation to be commercialized to the exclusion of the greater interest of the commonweal; all members of a society must share the responsibility for preserving the record of our struggles and experience.

In this light, I am even more disturbed by the absence of any significant conversations between publishers and the library community to establish standards that permit the preservation of digital books and mixed media texts as these become increasingly dominant. This concern of mine is not new, and was expressed in conversations within the OeBF; I have an obligation to raise awareness within its successor, the IDPF, now that I am a board member. Given the inherently delicate and mutable nature of digital material, it is imperative that we begin serious dialogues on this issue to ensure that the cultural and scientific products of our society are adequately distributed among organizations whose primary mission is to preserve access to that record. Those organizations are libraries, not publishers. Libraries.

I must believe that the publishers of honor who have survived longest on this planet must recognize the responsibility to preserve is one they are obligated to share with public institutions, and their best partners by dint of a long, established history are university and government libraries. These publishers have a long, fine, proud record; they surely do not want it tarnished through an accidental loss either by themselves or their partners, an accident no less catastrophic for the lack of ill intent. Therefore, our old friends, let us talk anew.

More generally, and much more poignantly, I am profoundly concerned about a shift in the equilibrium between libraries, advertising and merchant companies such as Google and Amazon, and commercial publishers, as reflected in the correspondence establishing what we must consider to be a social contract. All of these actors, from different springs of motivations, seek access to increasingly networked, and therefore increasingly valuable, information.

Was it to be permitted by Mammon that libraries be able to hold print material for the public good only while its wide circulation and dissemination were frustrated by its very physical nature? And that now, when information may be freely embedded, fragmented, re-combined, and flashed across the network, there is so much to be gained that there is too much to be risked, by allowing, nay, by encouraging, public institutions to possess it except through ephemeral licensing?

Let me be clear: I do not ascribe evil purpose to commercial enterprise. They are after all, publishing or advertising companies, and in the pursuit of their legitimate corporate aims, they are undeniably adding to the public good. Rather, I will instead persist in proclaiming, “You are not doing enough. You are doing good, but not enough, no longer enough.” And it is all of our fault for that, all our inability to elevate this concern, to make it a crisis, for it is. Our societies might not fail for it, but they will be lesser for it.

I am aware there are many who counsel such thoughts be left at whispers and not be loudly spoken, at the risk of losing Commerce’s half loaf of the newly digital, thus newly useful, and so they defer in their asking for the full loaf of what should rest ultimately with the Public. And therefore I think it might well inevitably never do so. And certainly the half loaf will not rest unbaked by our rightful asking for the whole. If we do not risk the offence, and fail to take the chance of a necessary conversation, then we will have sundered some of our children’s chances.