Technology Blog

Google’s mission, [Saul] Schniderman [president of the Library of Congress Professional Guild] contends, runs into copyright issues –and so does the World Digital Library. LC “cannot digitize the vast bulk of its holdings while the U.S. copyright law remains in effect…. We would therefore caution Congress not to regard the digitization of collections as the Library’s central mission or core function.” And Schniderman pointed to the perceived tradeoff between going digital and preserving LC’s cataloging functions: “[W]hile digitization projects are useful and prestigious, they provide access to only a microscopic portion of the Library’s collections, and for that reason should not be regarded as core functions that are more important than existing operations, such as our cataloging and classification work.”