I was searching the Library of Congress catalogue online one night, tracking down a 70-year-old book about politics and markets, when my son came in to watch me.  He was 8-years-old at the time but already a child of the internet age.  He asked what I was doing and I explained that I was researching the book so that I could find it in my own university library. “Why don’t you read it online?” he said, reaching over my shoulder and double-clicking the title, frowning when that merely led to another information page.  “How do you get to read the actual book?” I smiled at the assumption that all the works of literature were not merely in the Library of Congress, but actually on the net: available to anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world. Imagine what that would be like. Imagine the little underlined blue hyperlink from each title – to my son it made perfect sense.  The book’s title was in the catalogue and when you clicked the link, surely you would get to read it. That is what happened in his experience when one clicked a link.  Why not here? It was an old book, after all, no longer in print. Imagine being able to read the books, hear the music, watch the films – or at least the commercially unavailable ones that the Library thought it worthwhile to digitise. Of course, that is the kind of thing the law, in its brilliance, forbids.

I tried to explain this.  I showed him that there were some works that could be seen online. I took him to the photograph library, meaning to show him the wealth of historical photographs, but instead finding myself brooding over the lengthy listing of legal restrictions on the images, so that in many cases, only indistinct and tiny thumbnail images display to those searching outside the Library of Congress “because of potential rights considerations.”  The same was true of the scratchy folk songs from the 1920s, or the early film holdings.