IN DEPTH ‘‘
Ben White is a researcher at Bournemouth University’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management, and co-founder of Knowledge Rights 21.
The actions set out by KR21 touch on copyright, but others focus more on other instruments, such as contracts, consumer protections, competition, procurement and more.
Let libraries be libraries – standing up or giving up?
Lack of investment and rising costs grabs attention, but it is market and legal frameworks that are really undermining libraries’ ability to function. This is the result of a fundamental change in the legal relationship between libraries and the materials they provide access to. Knowledge Rights 21 has launched its “Let Libraries be Libraries” campaign and here Ben White highlights areas for action in the UK to avoid our institutions being written out of the digital age.
THINK tank and campaign group Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) has published an action plan (
https://knowledgerights21.org/library-action-plan/) setting out nine steps that the European Union and national governments could take to respond to the crisis in digital publishing. Here we take a look and explore which areas may be suitable in the UK.
In the analogue world, libraries own their collec- tions. The law (copyright) allows libraries to buy what they want, lend what they have bought to members of the public directly or via other libraries, as well as to make preservation copies. Importantly, this means that libraries are free to shape and develop their collections as they alone see fit (“collection development”) and provide access to it. Our patrons in turn rely on this in order to be able to enjoy their own rights – human rights like the right to science, information and expression, as well as the rights to copy in order to, in part, exercise these rights. However, in the digital age, these rights have dis- appeared. Libraries no longer have the opportunities and freedoms guaranteed by the law that they once enjoyed. In the digital environment they no longer have the right to buy content, build their collections
26 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
and lend. Whether they can or not, depends on what can be negotiated with publishers. In fact, some publishers now outright refuse to sell to libraries. Much digital content is just on loan – it’ll disappear from a library’s digital shelves when not “re-rented” from the publisher.
The actions set out by KR21 touch on copyright, but others focus more on other instruments, such as contracts, consumer protections, competition, pro- curement and more. Together, they offer a compre- hensive way of ensuring that our libraries can con- tinue to fulfil their potential to support Europe as a whole. They also complement KR21’s, Knowledge for a Stronger Europe (
https://knowledgerights21.org/eu- action-plan), focused on research and open science.
Same old problem 1
This loss of knowledge rights has been going on as long as the digital revolution. It may look different from one institution to the next but as pointed out by one Irish MEP (
https://tinyurl.com/ywzsfcvz), under these conditions it is impossible for public libraries and their patrons to build a stable affordable collec- tion of eBooks. This weakens the ability of users to access the information they need to participate fully
June-July 2026
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