I have to disagree with using Microsoft as the example of what not to do. I’d say Novell would be better – there’s a company that owned networking, but even though its protocol was called IPX/SPX, the I in the first moniker didn’t happen. We all know what happened to Novell because of that.

Microsoft on the other hand pioneered cheap, mass-market computing and networking. It was late to the Internet not because of a desire to build disconnected islands, but because at the time, the Internet was just one of many ways to err, internetwork. The Internet had only just started to move out of academia, and much of the cool stuff was in BBSes, FIDO, AOL, CIX and… the Microsoft Network. Roundabout 1995, Microsoft had spent bagloads of money to build MSN POPs linked to each other around the world, and there was lots of content there. I managed the PC/Computing forum on MSN for instance with multimedia content that you couldn’t display via web browsers on the Internet at the time.

Just like other walled gardens, MSN was expensive, especially in NZ where it cost something like $20 an hour to use.

Walled gardens are only fun until you learn there’s more interesting things outside so eventually, MSN was swallowed by the Internet that was growing by leaps and bounds, probably because it placed fewer restraints on creativity and allowed for the creation of *cough* dark corners.

That probably annoyed Gates but considering that the vast majority of users these days access the Internet with a Windows device using Internet Exploder, the company clearly didn’t miss that opportunity. You could argue that with DHTML etc, Microsoft laid the foundations for Web 2.0 too. Hotmail anyone? MS didn’t build the stuff that ran the Internet, but it’s crazy talk to say it hasn’t had a hand in pushing it forward.

Apple on the other hand is busy recreating the walled garden concept of the 90s with iTunes, the Apps Store and other services, and the iOS devices. It is much less of an Internet company than Microsoft and Google.

Going back to libraries, isn’t the issue here that they too are “walled gardens”? The difference nowadays though isn’t that the Internet will swallow libraries, but instead private companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or uhh… Facebook that have more money than small countries and the technical ability to create the giant OneLibrary are taking over.

If one of the above were to wave some money under our current government’s nose and say “hey, we’ll take care of that cost centre for you, guaranteeing and improving free public access”, it would happen. I just don’t know that it would be a good thing though.

The drive for increased returns through incremental increases in production in our primary industries doesn’t encourage or reward serious innovation or game-changing developments.

If we could multiply our margin on dairy by exporting finished products like infant formula vs milk powder we could either, a) make 10x as much profit, or b) make the same profit from a tenth of the cow population, leaving ample landscape in good shape.

But these things always seem simpler when you haven’t got a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Either way, I suspect we both agree that libraries will likely need to morph into something that a librarian of 50 or 100 years ago would probably disdain to refer to as “library”. 50 or 100? I think there are many librarians working today who will find the change difficult!

However, I’m an intellectual property wonk, so I think this piece needs to address the challenges that intellectual property regimes place on libraries wishing to offer the digital access to information that everyone is Googling for. In the US, library lending (and DVD rental, used books sales) is legal because of the “first sale doctrine”, which allows you to do what you want with copies of IP you have bought. It doesn’t apply to digital, nonrivalrous goods. I think it’s the main challenge to providing the type of access to digital “reading rooms” of the future. Google Books is great (the mobile app is a pretty nice reading experience), except you can only read a few pages of each work. My local library has an e-book lending program, but it’s crippled by DRM, and there is only one “copy” of each book available in the consortium, so the hold list waiting times for digital “checkout” are usually longer than waiting for a physical copy to become available downtown.

This all said, I don’t think librarians should give up. There is a lot of room for curation of the best content (the collection and discovery sides of the service) even when delivery is crippled by publishers unwilling to provide blanket licenses for their content at reasonable prices.