Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for March 2003
I can still picture the scene: About 30 of us crammed into one of the labs at the University of Michigan School of Information on a Friday afternoon in March 1995, about to throw the switch (actually, to send the e-mail with the URL) to open the Internet Public Library. That day was the culmination of many other days of incredibly hard work by everybody involved, in a two-credit graduate course that gave rise to the IPL project.
Designed as an online analogue to the brick-and-mortar public library, the IPL was immediately much more popular than any of us had predicted, forcing us to confront at once a crucial question: Now what? What would happen after the class ended? Nobody wanted to see it go away, so the decision to continue was easy. Finding the mechanism by which that could feasibly happen has been considerably more difficult.
To be sure, the IPL hasn’t survived these eight years (eight years!) without a lot of help and support. The administration at Michigan, where IPL is still housed, has been most generous over the years, and students there have created lots of great projects to make the IPL better and more useful. We’ve also received external funding: The Mellon Foundation wanted to learn how Internet-based nonprofits could be self-sustaining, and we tried several potentially useful projects, but didn’t have enough time to bring any to fruition. Support from ProQuest (née UMI) helped out for several years.
Once again, though, the IPL now finds itself in financial difficulty. It’s not alone, of course; Librarian’s Index to the Internet continues to do great work on very little money, for example. (LII Director Karen Schneider will happily give you an earful on that score.) And I won’t bore you with all the other companies, foundations, and agencies we approached, trying to figure out how to build a sustainable long-term funding mechanism.
The IPL is a really great idea, but the bottom line is that it’s not anybody’s responsibility to fund a “public library” for the entire Internet. Other libraries have communities or institutions that they serve; in return for that service, support and funding flow. The IPL doesn’t, and it’s an interesting question whether it ever will. Will the Internet ever be a “community” in the classic sense, with institutions like parks and police and so on that we’re used to in geographic communities?
And yet—sites like Yahoo and Google have managed to become very successful in serving this diffuse Internet world, and have generated lots of money to support their work. (True, Yahoo’s had some money difficulties but seems to be doing OK; Google’s privately held so we don’t know that much about it.) Perhaps they’ve just done a better job than the IPL at making themselves indispensable, extending their reach, explaining what they do in a compelling way. I’d hate to think that the concept of “library” is unsupportable in a digital environment, especially with all the “digital library” talk of the last decade; but maybe that’s a part of it too.
As I write this, it appears that the IPL’s situation is dire. It wouldn’t be the first time it has faced extinction, although what I’ve heard so far causes me serious concern. I think I’ve always known, deep inside, that it wouldn’t—couldn’t—last forever. Somehow, at previously perilous times, something has arisen to save the day, and I hope that by the time you read this, it will again. The leadership at Michigan believes this to be a worthwhile endeavor for their school and beyond, and I hope that they’re able to work out an immediate and ongoing sustainability strategy.
Perhaps the most provocative aspect of this situation is that the IPL is struggling at a time when many other libraries are having funding trouble—partly because of the economy, of course, but at least in some part because of a common perception that “everything’s on the Internet.” Very few companies or other organizations have figured out a way to successfully charge for digital information, and the popularity of file-sharing services such as Napster (of sainted memory) and its successors reinforce this difficulty. Quite possibly, the IPL’s peril is a warning shot for all libraries: If people aren’t willing to, or don’t see the necessity of paying for digital works, this could bode ill for us all. But that’s another story.