China Digital Library Industry Indepth Research and Investment Strategy Planning Report, 2013-2017

The fast development of Internet radically changes the traditional information service structure. It causes a fundamental change of information collection, processing, transmission and way of getting. Thus drives the traditional library transforming into digital library.

The final target of establishing a digital library is to promote the information sharing and exchanging. Researches show that during the development of digital library every country pays highly attention to information resources construction, communication and cooperation and user-centered service model. Meanwhile, all the countries realize that development of digital library is important to national information enhancing. It is significant to ensure the further development of digital library.

From the world-wide view, major contributions to the digital library construction include colleges and universities, national library and software houses. Among them, the colleges and universities are one of the major forces to the digital library construction; national library plays an important role during the construction and it usually works as “demonstrated plan”; software houses provide IT which is prominent for digital library construction. Because of this, software houses are very important during the digital library construction.

A large sum of fund is necessary for any national digital library plans. And nearly all the countries are generous to this fund issue. Major sources of digital library construction fund in different countries are government input and subsidized fund from institutions like foundations.

The digital repository always comes first during the digital library construction, that is, literature resources digitalization. As the library digitalization is limited by intellectual property, there is an overall character for the digitalization work in all countries--start with the library historical data which with intellectual property.

However, intellectual property is a problem which should be faced when enlarging the collection resources of digital library. We can see some development from the Google digital library issue. In the face of lawsuit, Google proposes the following solutions: 1. promises to scan European books which are published 150 years ago only, because these books are out of property protection term; 2. for the European books which are not yet out of term and translated into English, Google will confirm and get the agreement from the property owners before collecting into digital library; 3. for the “orphan books”, European books which are not yet out of term but the authors are no longer in the world, will collect into digital library.

Even though Google makes advances in the copyright issue, the core copyright issue is still not solved. Forward provides the following copyright authorization models on this issue: contract model for digital work disseminator and copyright owner; publishers as the copyright licensing agency model; copyright authorization model for professional copyright agent proxy digital works; copyright authorization model for copyright collective management organization; collection model for technology platform service operators; implied license and copyright infringement risk minimization model; statutory license model; open license model; copyright self-service license model.

Nowadays, it is still controversial on the digital library copyright issue. We are confident that with the development of the market, a better solution will be found and digital library will continue to develop quickly.

Qianzhan Business Information Co., Ltd. Industry Research Center
Research Team of Digital Library Industry