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German National Library causes blogger uproar

The explosion of online content and digital media poses a challenge for librarians, who are used to dealing with archives of physical material. Still, most libraries are learning to adapt; the US Library of Congress, for example, runs a Web Archive that it populates using a combination of crawlers to harvest content and subject specialists to select relevant material. Now, the German National Library, the Deutsche Bibliothek, is starting to gather material for its own digital archive, but its first steps have accidentally gotten the online community quite upset.

The Deutsche Bibliothek is kind enough to translate many of the documents relevant to its digital archiving program into English. The program kicked off in earnest back to 2002, when it negotiated an agreement with publishers that governed the use of their digital material by the library. That agreement stipulates that the library regards "online publications as fundamentally worthy of submission and collection." To protect the publishers, however, it stipulates that the archived material can only be accessed from within the library, and that a fee will be charged to any users that want printouts or digital copies of this material.

But it appears that the Deutsche Bibliothek is now starting to look into all the noncommercial and self-published material that is available online, and it's not necessarily going over all that smoothly. The Financial Times is reporting that the library's director says that, "at the moment, we're only collecting e-books and online dissertations but we're going to be moving into the areas of blogs and websites fairly soon."

Unfortunately, the bloggers aren't feeling honored by their inclusion. It seems that some of Germany's bloggers got ahold of a copy of the law (PDF) that establishes the library as a federal institution, "having legal capacity." That legal capacity apparently allows the Deutsche Bibliothek to issue formal requests that individuals deposit materials in its archives. Should those deposits fail to take place, it is, "entitled to acquire the media works through other channels at the expense of the depositors."

But the seizing of online content is apparently the least of their worries. The law indicates that interfering with the Deutsche Bibliothek's activities is an administrative offense, one punishable by fines of up to €10,000. Fears apparently spread that the bloggers would be facing a stark choice: hand over all their past material in an archive-worthy form, or face a hefty fine.

The Financial Times' report indicates that the Deutsche Bibliothek is actually contemplating a system much closer to the Library of Congress', so bloggers shouldn't have to do anything. Still, the episode clearly indicates that laying the groundwork for these programs should include some effort to communicate with those who will ultimately be affected by them.

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