Libertarians and the Library

A year ago, I wrote a piece here about the great art of the Gothic and Renaissance periods, and how we owe its existence to the Dead Hand of the (Tuscan) State. But where should we look for actions of slightly more modern government working to enrich our lives? Certainly not in the unending flow of nutty, illiberal laws; nor in the insidious creep of compliance culture (subject of a memorable Stephen Fry podcast). So, here’s an idea: look to the British Library.

More specifically, their Turning the Pages project, 10 years in the developing, that put our national library in the very first rank of learning innovation worldwide. (See the video.) The project’s achievement has been to digitize 15 (so far) of the Library’s most valuable manuscripts, and deliver them inside an interactive online environment that re-creates the experience of handling them in the raw.

The interface allows you to zoom right in, to examine the books close-up in a way that would be impossible through a display case. To experience their magic and appreciate their craft, wherever you happen to live. The original Lindisfarne Gospels, the Sherborne Missal and Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an are now viewable by anyone with access to broadband Internet—most of us, in other words. As well as fulfilling an obvious cultural-historical remit, replication preserves these treasures (digitally at least) forever.

Of course, the job could have been done by the private sector; but the fact that it wasn’t is surely down to the unknown, unmeasured (or unknowable and ummeasurable), and very long-term, monetary returns from such a venture. In fact, there has been commercial interest, from overseas, including from private book collectors and the institutions that guard what’s left of Ancient Egypt. Some project costs will be recouped as a result.

More important still, non-profit entities in the UK have access to the BL’s technology at a price that doesn’t even recover those costs for the Library. Leeds’ Henry Moore Institute was among the first to make use of the technology.

Speaking at Online Information 2008 (#onlineinfo2008) in December, the BL’s Barry Smith trailed a project by Newcastle Public Libraries due to launch in 2009 (“before June”, Anne Waller, Newcastle Collections Project Officer, told me). They’ve chosen 12 texts from the city’s collection that capture the unique cultural, linguistic, and pictorial heritage of the North-East from a variety of perspectives.

NPL will make available to us all the originals of such books as The Howdy and the Upgetting (written c. 1790 in dialect) and Gray’s Chorographia (1649). The Heritage Lottery Fund grant to cover the project, which includes digitization, conservation and the building of a custom website to launch in tandem with Newcastle’s new city library, was £429,000.

Perhaps projects like this have no measurable or commercial value. But they certainly have value; the queues at the Turning the Pages consoles inside the British Library tell you that. And they’re only possible because the Library is run on the basis that it’s for us all, something that crass anti-state “libertarians” usually misunderstand and always under-estimate.

Image courtesy of Steve Cadman’s flickr set.

First published at Liberal Conspiracy.