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Jeanneney, Jean-Noël. Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe. Trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 92p. alk. paper, $11 (paper); $18 (cloth) (ISBN 0226395782;0226395774). LC 2006-19650.
This short book by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, former president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is an updated and revised version of Quand Google défie l’Europe: Plaidoyer pour un sursaut, first published in France in 2005. As he himself notes, many immediately mistranslated the word "défie" as "defy"; more correctly, the word means "challenge," and in this long essay, Jeanneney seeks not to condemn Google (and by extension, all digitization projects), but to challenge that company and its legions of users to ponder the implications of digitizing the contents of many of the world’s large research libraries. Jeanneney writes from his perspective as a scholar of political science and history and as leader of one of Europe’s most important cultural institutions. His concern that the availability of large numbers of freely available English-language publications on the Web might nurture a peculiarly American view of the world was one of the main emphases of his original essay in Le Monde. Here, while Jeanneney retains that concern about American cultural dominance, he has set himself (and librarians and archivists) a larger challenge. As Ian E. Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, notes in his introduction to the book, Jeanneney is moving beyond questions of technology and professional practice to questions about "fundamental cultural policy issues" and "the nature of the global information infrastructure."
Jeanneney opens his book with a recollection of his reaction to the announcement of Google’s plans to digitize the contents of five major research libraries (including the Bodleian, which, he notes ruefully, looked across the Atlantic rather than across the English Channel to form a partnership). While pleased at the potential that mass digitization could have for providing access to everyone, Jeanneney also felt anxiety over the nature of the Google project: "An indeterminate, disorganized, unclassified, uninventoried profusion is of little interest." Unlike Google’s owners, whose goal is to digitize everything, Jeanneney believes that "there can be no universal library … Choices are always made, and must be made." Since it will be impossible to digitize all the millions of books ever printed, some principles of selection must be developed. The process of selection, says Jeanneney, will pit cultural and intellectual impulses against commercial interests; thus, the need for public institutions (such as the European Union and its cultural institutions) to finance and plan for digitizing a collection—that is, an intellectually coherent array of materials. Moreover, argues Jeanneney, public institutions must do this, because only they have the mission and commitment to preserve digital materials for the long term and for the common good.
In a chapter entitled "Remarkable Progress," Jeanneney scoffs at those who have no use for the Internet; they are "malcontents," "people living in the past." The chapter addresses the "formidable ambivalence" of that "marvelous invention," the Web. He points to the benefits of the Web for researchers and citizens far from the economic and political mainstream. But neither does Jeanneney believe that the birth of the Internet means the death of the book. Rather, the Web will bring new life to forgotten or hard-to-find books and, at the same time, enhance the status of librarians, archivists, and booksellers. "Librarians have always helped to organize chaos," says Jeanneney; with mass digitization (a term, by the way, that Jeanneney does not use), librarians will "stand beside professors and schoolteachers as essential intermediaries of knowledge."
Jeanneney considers the issue of digitization and the forces of the marketplace by contrasting the development of radio, television, and the film industries in the United States and in the United Kingdom and France. He suggests that the public subsidy of those industries in Europe best supports European culture and invention and that advertising (in these media and on the Web) can be problematic, given the naïveté of some users. Jeanneney does not reject public-private partnerships out of hand but clearly is in favor of giving primary control of intellectual capital to public institutions and governments. In a chapter entitled "Hyperpower," Jeanneney links Google’s potential dominance with U.S. political hegemony. He comments on the Bush presidency, American support for the death penalty, the invasion of Baghdad and the looting and loss of Iraq’s cultural treasures, and the United States’ general go-it-alone attitude on issues such as the environment and the international criminal court. Jeanneney is wearing his politics on his sleeve here, I think, but he uses all this to suggest that the United States and Europe are fundamentally different, and that a similar dominance of the Internet by Google will lead to "unilateral control over the thinking of the world," and even censorship. Europe must present some competition to Google and to the dominance of the English language across the globe, not just through digitization but also through the creation of a European search engine.
Another of Jeanneney’s prime concerns is Google’s "apparent indifference to … long-term preservation and conservation." This, he says, has long been the mission of public institutions, and Jeanneney challenges them to take on what Google cannot or will not. Google and, by extension, the Internet are experiencing the "arrogance" of all new media, which believe that they will sweep away all that came before. What Jeanneney offers is a "cultural and industrial project" that builds upon the existing strengths of our cultural institutions and the people who work in them. Instead of mass digitization, Jeanneney suggests careful selection of materials; instead of "massive amounts of disorganized information," he proposes the Ariadne’s thread of classification of some sort. National libraries, publishers, government funding agencies, and all book people need to be involved in this effort.
Some readers of this book will not be convinced by Jeanneney. Some readers will fail to see any nuance in his argument. At times, he is too Eurocentric (and perhaps a bit defensive?); at times, this reader wondered whether we have the time, money, and luxury to proceed in the ideal fashion Jeanneney proposes. But Jeanneney’s book invites librarians and the library profession to consider the ways in which the Google project has the potential to transform research, reading, and notions of intellectual property for good or ill. Will Google become a version of Borges’ "Library of Babel," or make information universally available to those whose call it is to shape information into knowledge?—Cecile M. Jagodzinski, Indiana University.
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