Open Access News

[D]espite the present focus on who owns the digitized content of books, the more critical battle for readers will be over how we manage the information about that content --information that's known technically as metadata. We've been managing book metadata basically the same way since Callimachus cataloged the 400,000 scrolls in the Alexandrian Library....Arrange the books one way on the shelves, physically separate the metadata from them, and arrange the metadata in convenient ways. This technique works so well for organizing physical books that we've long overlooked its basic limitation: Because books and their metadata have, until recently, been physical objects, we've had to pick one and only one way to order them in defined, stable ways. When Melvil Dewey introduced the Dewey decimal classification system in 1876, it was an advance because it shelved books by topic, making the library's floor plan into a browsable representation of the order of knowledge itself. But no one classification can represent everyone's way of organizing the world. You may file a field guide to the birds under natural history, while someone else files it under great examples of the illustrative art and I file it under good eating. The digital world makes it possible for the first time to escape this limitation. Publishers, libraries, even readers can potentially create as many classification schemes as we want. But to do this, we'll need two things. First, we'll need what are known as unique identifiers-such as the call letters stamped on the spines of library books. Unfortunately, any system that assigns numbers to books based on what they're about is going to suffer from Dewey's weakness. Both Google Print and Amazon use the International Standard Book Number, or ISBN. Created in the 1960s, the ISBN is a good starting point; still, it may not be the ultimate solution. Only books published since the '60s have them, for one thing....[I]in the near future we'll need identifiers for individual chapters, paragraphs, even illustrations. ISBNs only identify the book as a whole. Second, we're going to need massive collections of metadata about each book. Some of this metadata will come from the publishers. But much of it will come from users who write reviews, add comments and annotations to the digital text, and draw connections between, for example, chapters in two different books....The real challenge to traditional publishing today comes not from the digitizing of books, then, but from the very nature of the Web itself. Using metadata to assemble ideas and content from multiple sources, online readers become not passive recipients of bound ideas but active librarians, reviewers, anthologists, editors, commentators, even (re)publishers. Perhaps that's what truly scares publishers and authors about Google Print.