Where Was I?

Backtracking a bit to cover some events from the last couple of weeks. That Ten News story I taped finally ran on Friday 24 June, but with all the delays and amidst other (and perhaps more urgent and timely) news stories it didn't turn out quite as well as it might have - in the end they used only a short soundbite from what had been probably five minutes' worth of material in the interview. That's the nature of these 'soft' news stories, I guess - they're ready to be chopped and changed as required when more important stories come to hand. What we had thought it would be was a more substantial piece to be promoted throughout the week, but in the end they ran only one promo for it on Thursday night. Ah well.

For the following Friday, 1 June, I was an invited panellist at a seminar run by the Australian Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), an organisation which manages copyrights (traditionally especially in the print sector) on behalf of authors and publishers. The seminar focussed on "Copyright in the Digital Age", and so my main contribution was to warn people in the print publishing industry to go down the same ill-chosen path of belligerence as have the music and film industries - down that road lies nothing much more than complete alienation of content users, and damage beyond repair of the content creator / content user relationship.

What was interesting about the seminar, though (and Michelle, who was also in attendance, might want to add her views here), was that in question time at various points of the day the discussion turned away from the issues at hand, and towards questions surrounding the Digital Object Identifier framework, even though DOIs had not been discussed directly in any of the presentations (there was only a one-page DOI handout included with the seminar materials).

Clearly, then, there remains great interest in (as well as, judging by the quality of some of the questions, plenty of misinformation about) DOIs, especially amongst authors, it seems. However, the discussion sometimes reminded me of similar discussions about creative commons licencing (and one is being played out on fibreculture as we speak), where content creators and IP rights holders often seem to think that projects such as DOI or CC aim to abolish traditional royalty or copyright regimes and force them to use the new systems. Nothing could be further from the truth - CC, after all, is a voluntary licencing scheme which allows content creators to let go of some of their proprietary rights in favour of a greater, common, good if they so wish, but it certainly doesn't force them to.

Similarly, DOI is simply a metadata system (if a particularly well-designed and well-supported one), which enables content creators and publishers to attach metadata to content at a much more granular level (e.g. to an individual book chapter or even to specific tables, illustrations, or data sets). It doesn't in itself introduce a new royalty collection system (and most importantly DOIs themselves may be used in the tracking of royalties, but do not collect them directly), and authors or publishers are certainly not forced to use it. In many ways, DOI can be compared simply to the good old ISBN - but it's an ISBN on steroids which contains a good deal more (and more specific) metadata.

What DOI does do (and what hasn't been fully acknowledged by most people involved), though, is to severely affect, and potentially alter, the future of libraries. The DOI system in effect is a massive, multi-sited, digital library catalogue that is run by authors and publishers themselves - and in this library the DOI (much like a traditional library call number) can be used to find and (and this is significant) retrieve any piece of content which has been tagged with a DOI, provided that applicable royalty payments are made.

If two conditions are met - 1. that the vast majority of publishers use DOI (and this is increasingly the case), and 2. that there are systems which facilitate end user access to DOI searches (which is possible, and as far as I can tell is starting to happen) -, then this has the potential of eliminating traditional libraries as well as electronic database providers as the intermediaries of information retrieval. Instead, the user could go directly to a DOI search site, discover the content they're after, and negotiate royalties payments directly with the content author or publisher.

So where does this leave libraries or database providers? Well, on the one hand they may be particularly well placed to provide DOI search access to the end user (for libraries, this is just another step from providing access to the databases, after all - it would continue the trend away from stocking physical material and towards a focus on digital content). Both libraries and database providers are also likely to focus on value-added service provision - in the form of specialist and reference librarians who can help users discover relevant information in the DOI library, or in the form of providing additional metadata that is not available through DOI directly or can be gathered from a broader analysis of individual DOI records.

Interesting times ahead for information workers...