Digital-Only Media Is a Loss for Libraries, Too ⇥ arl.org

Sally Sax, writing for the Association of Research Libraries:

Twenty-five years after the US copyright office’s first DMCA review, libraries operate in an increasingly non-competitive digital information environment. A lack of digital ownership rights remains a critical barrier to libraries serving their missions as memory institutions. The closest libraries can get to ownership of commercial digital content is a perpetual access license (PAL), and the marketplace may be deciding that PALs are no longer viable from its perspective. […]

If libraries are restricted from keeping working copies of digital media due to software restrictions, prohibitive costs, and legal concerns, people are going to look back a hundred or more years from now and wonder why we decided we no longer wanted to keep a cultural record. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.