[Upd-discuss] Google defies Europe, by Jean-Noel Jeanneney, Director of the National Library of France, Le Monde, 22.01.05
Zapopan Martin Muela-Meza
zapopanmuela@yahoo.com
Tue, 15 Feb 2005 11:37:13 -0800 (PST)
Google defies Europe, by Jean-Noel Jeanneney,
Director of the National Library of France, Le
Monde, 22.01.05
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/imprimer_article/0%2C1-0@2-3232%2C36-395266%2C0.html
Quand Google défie l'Europe, par Jean-Noël
Jeanneney
LE MONDE | 22.01.05 | 15h49
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"SPARC Open Access Forum" <SPARC-OAForum@arl.org>
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 13:06:13 -0500
From: "Peter Suber" <peters@earlham.edu> View
Contact Details View Contact Details
Subject: [SOAF] FYI France: Google digital
library vs. France?...
[Forwarding from Jack Kessler via Klaus Graf.
--Peter.]
FYI France: Google digital library vs. France?...
& vs.
others?
The wonderful digital library news from Google --
that all the world's books are to be digitized --
has not been received with unrestrained glee by
everyone. I've already tried,
previously here, to suggest the worries of the
rare book community: see this
FYIFrance ejournal's December 15 2004 issue.
Now comes another sceptic: from the world outside
of our "Anglo-Saxon" one... an "outside" world
increasingly and self-consciously so... He is
very upset, about Google's
digital library plans, and the rest of us would
do well to listen.
Jean-Noël Jeanneney is president of the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France: this is the
august position of "administrateur", once
occupied by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Julien
Cain, and other luminaries over the centuries
before them -- individuals
who, often against seemingly-insuperable odds,
built and maintained the great library which was
the Bibliothèque du Roi, and then the
Bibliothèque Nationale, and now has become the
BNF.
Jeanneney speaks for himself, in what he says
about the Google digital library, but he is no
crusading journalist merely grabbing at a
headline. Google will be hearing from plenty
of those, as well. But Jean-Noël Jeanneney heads
one of the leading cultural institutions in the
entire "non-English-speaking world".
That is a very large world, still, that
non-English-speaking one.It includes Europe, also
Russia, also Africa and Latin America; and yes
also Asia, the billions of information users who
are there, too. "English-speaking" being a matter
not of capacity but
of choice: for example very good English is
spoken in India, but people there might rather
choose something else...
Does Jeanneney speak for them? No, he would not
pretend this: he would disclaim representing
"Europe", even -- and pressed to the point he
might say he speaks not even for his own nation,
or even his BNF, but only for himself.
But the rest of us might do well to consider him
representative, I myself believe, in many of his
remarks which follow below: who else, to give us
blunt and honest advice, if not the French? --
-- Jeanneney does not like the "crushing American
domination"
which he senses in Google's digital library
project, he says -- and would anyone else, among
the great institutions and cultures which
populate the "non-English-speaking world"?
-- and he is suspicious, of what he pungently
labels, "research-for-profit, cloaked in the
appearence of disinterest"
-- so in these two respects alone, then, digital
library developers everywhere might read, and
carefully consider, Jeanneney's
perhaps-representative and at-least-indicative
and perhaps-very-influential remarks.
The article appears in the January 22 issue of Le
Monde:
POINT DE VUE
Quand Google défie l'Europe, par Jean-Noël
Jeanneney
LE MONDE | 22.01.05 | 15h49
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/imprimer_article/0%2C1-0@2-3232%2C36-395266%2C0.html
-- translations into English which follow here
are my own
--
"Google defies Europe", by Jean-Noël Jeanneney,
president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France
Le Monde, January 22 2005 (URL above)
"The risk, of a crushing American domination, of
the idea of the
world to be held by future generations... "For
now, the news has attracted the attention of only
librarians and computer scientists. But I would
measure the significance of
this in cultural terms, and so in political
terms: this is enormous..."
-- additional discussion by the French, of their
BNF president's remarks, also is easily viewed
in two locations --
* Biblio-fr (French librarians. econference)
archive http://listes.cru.fr/wws/arc/biblio-fr
(search on the thread "Re: faut-il crier haro
sur
Google?")
* Internet Actu - Fing - INIST/CNRS
http://www.internetactu.net/?p=5810
-- Jeanneney says,
"Google is, as everyone knows, the premier search
engine for guiding Internet users through the
immensity of the Web... And it is first in terms
of sheer capitalistic weight: since its listing
on the stock exchange in New York in June 2004,
it has found and
it will continue to find an abundance of new
financial resources.
"Therefore and thereby, on the 14th of December,
this corporation announced with great fanfare
that it has concluded contracts with five of the
most celebrated and resource-rich libraries of
the Anglo-Saxon world..."
-- the corporate and capitalistic and
"market-driven" aspects of such a project, all
increasingly just taken for granted in the US,
still are objects of great suspicion everywhere
else, and US Internet developers need to
remember this --
"Contracts for doing what? For nothing less than
the digitization, within a few years, of 15
million works in order to make them accessible
online... for free, for those which
now are in the public domain, and in teasing
extracts for the others
which still are under copyright, awaiting the
passage of time..."
"They are speaking here of a total -- dizzying
statistic -- of 4.5 billion pages. The initial
reaction, facing such a gigantic prospect, might
be pure and simple jubilation. Look how it has
taken form, in such a short time, the messianic
dream defined at the close of the last century:
all of the knowledge of the world, accessible
for free across the entire planet. Thus true
equality at last is established, thanks to
science, to the greatest
benefit of the poorest nations, and of the most
disadvantaged populations.
"But we have to look a little further into this.
Some great difficulties were born at the same
time..." -- the "value-free" and
magically-beneficial contribution to
civilization of science, both Big Science and
small science, also is not taken for granted so
often, outside of the US --
"Here we find the risk of a crushing domination,
by America, of the idea which future generations
will have of the world. No matter what the
immediate effect is of the Google
announcement, the sheer exhaustivity of the
undertaking puts all this beyond
our reckoning, from a humanistic point of view.
Any undertaking
of this nature will require drastic choices,
among the immense
variety of possibilities which it offers."
-- I add here one of my favorite quotations from
Umberto
Eco:
"...the issue which gives me the greatest
anxiety of my
life: the conservation of books... I am
terrorized by the
idea that all the books which have appeared on
cellulose
paper since the 19th century are destined to
disappear
because they are so fragile... When I pick up a
Gallimard
from the 1950s, I have the impression of having
in my
hands a lamb being burned as a sacrifice...
"We are confronted by a fundamental choice of
civilization... _But who, what authority will
decide
which books to retain?_ Plato and Dante have
known their
periods of disgrace, although they have been
able to
transcend the centuries...
[emphasis added -- interview in _Le Nouvel
Observateur_,
no.1406, 17-23 Oct 1991, an issue entitled, "No,
Imaging
Has Not Killed the Civilization of the Written
Word: The
Revenge of the Books", translation of the above
by me in
the FYI France ejournal issue of Feb 15, 1993.
JK.]
-- for Jeanneney too says,
"The libraries launching themselves into this
adventure certainly are generously open to the
civilizations and works of other countries.
Nevertheless: the criteria of choice will be
heavily influenced -- even if we contribute
ourselves, uncomplainingly, to the riches of
this project -- by a point of view which is
Anglo-Saxon, with its specific approach to the
diversities of human civilization.
"I remember our Bicentenary of the Revolution, in
1989, when I was in charge of certain
celebrations. It was damaging and difficult for
the well-being of my nation -- for its image and
for its own understanding of itself, of its past,
of events shining or shady -- that when we came
to our commemorations we had to seek, in English
or American databases, recitals and
interpretations which were biased in so many
ways: "The
Scarlet Pimpernel" crushing "Quatre-vingt-treize"
-- the valiant British
aristocrats triumphing over the bloody Jacobins
-- the guillotine obscuring The Rights of Man
and the brilliant contributions of the
Convention. That experience was instructive, and
it puts us on our guard.
"We should not forget, too, another aspect of
this work-in-progress: in the ocean of the
Internet, where everything can be found -- the
true along with the false -- the process of
validation of the products of research, by
scientific authorities and in their journals,
takes on an essential role. Anglo-Saxon science,
which already is dominant in a certain number of
domains, will become over-valued, inevitably --
with a crushing
advantage to English, over the languages of other
cultures, including those of other European
cultures.
"It will be said that we speak here not of
complete works, because those by definition are
not yet in the public domain, but only of
extracts, for the protection of authors and
publishers. But in fairness this publicity alone
will be discriminatory, and
necessarily. Under the appearance of gratuity the
Internet user in fact will repay Google, qua
consumer, as that corporation lives 99% off of
publicity, and the project which it has
announced surely envisions a
return-on-investment. And little ads in the page
margins and preferred links will lead to sales,
accentuating the imbalance."
-- and Jeanneney is careful to offer not just
defensiveness but also a challenge, a
competitive one -- "Ever since the question
first was posed, following the
second world war -- initially in film and then
generally in the mass communications industries
-- the issue of the French response to American
domination, as a matter of principle if not in
outright reaction, has weighed upon all of our
originality here. A first
response was protectionism, via a quota system,
in theaters and then on the television. This was
a legitimate reply, and it was partially
effective. But in the present case such a
strategy would be impossible, given the nature of
the Web. There is a second approach, though, one
which already has proven itself on several
Websites: that of a counter-attack, one with an
emphasis on cultural differences.
"In this matter France and her Bibliothèque
Nationale have a special responsibility toward
the francophone world. But no European nation is,
we know, strong enough to undertake such an
effort. I certainly would be the last to ignore
the efforts thus
far accomplished: the digital library developed
by the Bibliothèque nationale de France under the
name of Gallica -- which already offers 80,000
works and 70,000 images online, and soon will
offer the fulltexts of the great French journals
of the
19th century -- now is accessible, to the
plaudits of numerous researchers and citizens,
and it spreads our influence throughout the
world. But it exists only through the subsidies
of the French government, which are not
unlimited, and through our own
BNF resources, which are assembled valiantly but
with difficulty. Our annual expense is not even
a thousandth of the vast sum announced now by
Google. The combat is unequal by far.
"Another approach is needed. And it can only be
deployed on a pan-European scale: a Europe
determined to be not just a market, but a
shining center of culture and political influence
without peer around the planet.
"So the time has come for a solemn appeal. It
calls upon
the
leaders of the Union, in its three leading
institutions, to
respond without delay -- for, very quickly, the
position
will be
taken, the habits will be formed, it will be to
late to
nudge
them aside later on.
"A multi-year plan must be defined and adopted
this year at
Brussels. A generous budget must be provided. It
is in
providing
these public funds that we will give to our
citizens and
our
researchers -- providing them as necessary
expenses and not
as
consumer products -- a protection against the
perverse
effects of
research-for-profit, cloaked in the appearence of
disinterest.
"It is only by relying on national government
initiatives
that we
will prevent all of our archival photographic
collections
from
falling into the hands of American corporations
(Corbis, a
subsidiary of Microsoft, already has taken things
far in
that
direction). It is only by mobilizing specialized
laboratories
that we will develop search engines as well as
software
which are
our own.
"Everywhere one calls upon, nowadays, the urgency
of
long-term
research and industrial development policies
which will
assure,
in the face of strong global competition trends,
a pathway
for
the originality which Europe can contribute:
well, here it
is,
exactly -- this is the challenge which we must
confront. We
can
do it, we must do it.
"* Jean-Noël Jeanneney, former secretary of state
for
communications, is the President of the
Bibliothèque
Nationale de
France and of the association Europartenaires."
--oOo--
Note:
Am I personally in favor of any of this, either
of what
Google is
proposing or of what Jeanneney is calling for
here to
combat it?
I do not see the two as opposed, myself -- I am
very much
in
favor of both, in fact. It always has been as
Jeanneney
himself
suggests, I believe: elsewhere in the above piece
he
observes,
"All the experience of history shows that in the
past no
new mode
of communication ever has been simply substituted
for that
which
preceded it -- instead it complements the other,
often
adding
value to both."
-- certainly Henri-Jean Martin suggests this,
too, and
Elizabeth
Eisenstein confirms it, regarding "transitions in
media".
People
still write, in spite of centuries of printing.
And people
still
speak, and paint, and decorate their buildings,
in spite of
centuries of writing, so Hugo's "ceci tuera cela"
was an
over-statement. And no decades in history ever
have
witnessed
such paper production and consumption, as those
now which
have
followed the arrival, proclaimed a quarter
century ago, of
"the
paperless library".
And this will continue, it appears to me. There
is room for
both,
and more. The world still contains much
illiteracy:
illiteracy
regarding the written and printed word, and also
illiteracy
regarding the visual world, and sound, and taste,
and
multi-media
representations of all of these and more. Many of
us, on
the
globe, still cannot "read and write", and all too
few of us
can
really "see" or "hear".
From Geoffroy Tory to Roland Barthe to Edward
Tufte, we
have been
taught how little really most of us know of the
visual and
many
other worlds of "texts". Most of us still are
discovering
the
worlds of Bach, and of Rock and Rap. And all too
few of us
really
understand "color", whether we are adept at
manipulating
our
cellphones or not. And virtual reality developers
only now
are
getting started on the richness & depth &
complexities of
multi-media representation.
And we need them all: because different people
communicate
in
different ways, on different occasions: a
globalizing world
so
devoted to "diversity", as the present one is,
can ill
afford to
block off one particular communication channel in
favor of
any other.
Should the approach be "combat", rather than
"cooperation"?
Well,
cooperation does work better, sometimes. But an
old
definition of
"trade" is "warfare by peaceful means". So
Jeanneney's
call-to-arms, in the above, to me gains much in
strategy
and
tactics to balance its occasional
over-simplifications...
No there is not an "anglo-saxon world", as an
example of
the
latter: Oxford and London friends long have made
clear to
me just
how separate we in the US and UK are -- and when
they
haven't,
other friends in Liverpool and Glasgow have --
and just
when all
of that begins to look alike, at least comparing
it to
places
elsewhere on the planet, recent social trends in
San Jose
California and in London's Brixton remind me of
just how
changeable the most settled circumstances may
quickly
become.
I'll take Jeanneney or anyone else French on
tours of
elementary
schools in California or in Greater London,
nowadays, and
challenge them to find anything therein easily
categorized
as
being simply "anglo-saxon".
But Jeanneney knows this, I am sure. Modern
France is the
same.
He is making merely a strategic and tactical
point, in
asserting
his "us vs. them" of "Europe vs. 'the
anglo-saxons'". It is
a
valid question, I believe, how one marshals one's
own
troops; but
for some causes whatever it takes will do, and I
wouldn't
question his judgment on that.
My own position, then, is merely strategic and
tactical as
well.
Qua American I ought to and in fact do welcome
the
competition:
the "business of America" being "business"... If
France or
Europe
or anyone else comes up with strong competition,
for
Google's new
digital library model, I welcome that: it will
strengthen
the
Google effort, and add value to the efforts of
all. If
Europe
does come up with a market entry, I might even
buy some
more
Google shares... that's "market capitalism"...
Qua strategist and tactician myself, though, I am
very
concerned
that my own team might become short-sighted, too:
might not
realize what the others in the market -- what the
customers, in
fact, who always must be heard -- are thinking,
and doing.
A
mutual misunderstanding problem... India and
China, for
instance,
both might raise points similar to Jeanneney's
"Scarlet
Pimpernel" objections, above; or Vietnam and the
Philippines
might do so -- and very justifiably in my own
view -- to
American-dominated digital library efforts.
So it is at least in that spirit that I translate
and
publicize
Jeanneney's remarks here: US and other digital
library
developers
all need to see, and consider, the whole picture
-- and it
has
been my own experience, since the very invention
of the
public
Internet, and certainly since the beginnings of
"The Web"
and
"digital libraries", that digital development
tends to
focus on
its own navel, on itself, and too often in
documents which
have
been written only in English.
There is a bigger world out there. Here a leading
exponent
of
that "non-English-speaking world" is presenting
his views.
We
would do well to listen very carefully. He is
critical, and
he
makes points which appeal far beyond our
pocketbooks, to
opinions
and ideals of equality and diversity and fairness
which we
hold
as dear as he does. There also is simply the
impoverishment
of
our own effort, which would result from excluding
him and
the
others. And there are more of him than there are
of us;
and,
finally, they are at the very least "the
customers".
Together, albeit in competition, we and the
Europeans and
many
others _all_ might fashion a better "information"
world,
using
different digital library techniques which --
like the oral
&
written & printed "word" historically -- do not
replace but
in
fact will complement one another.
So, on the US listening once again here to the
French,
perhaps
ironically it is as Kent warned Lear, about blunt
and
honest
views being more useful than flattery:
"thy youngest daughter does not love thee
least... see
better, Lear."
=====
ENG: "Corporations are not democratic institutions --their directors and managers owe no accountability to anyone but the shareholders that employ them."
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ESP: "Las corporaciones (empresas) no son instituciones democráticas: a sus directores y gerentes no se les puede fincar responsabilidades ante nadie excepto ante sus accionistas que les emplean."
-- Bakan, Joel. (2004). The Corporation. The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power : La corporación (empresa). La búsqueda patológica de ganancias y poder. London: Constable & Robinson, p. 151
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