BANGKOK — Viewers of Thai soap operas now have a choice: they can follow the over-dramatized acting and weepy plot lines of shows like “The Glass Around the Diamond” or they can read pro-government political messages scrolling on the bottom of the screen.
“The Thai people love peace but when we go to war, we are not fearful,” reads one of the dozens of messages broadcast on two government channels exhorting people to oppose the protest movement that has paralyzed parts of Bangkok for more than seven weeks.
“Sometimes the Thai people have to fight bad Thai people,” says another.
Thailand’s political crisis is playing out on the streets here, where antigovernment protesters, who are demanding new elections, are defending their fortified encampment in the commercial heart of the city. But political battles are also being waged through television, Facebook, community radio stations and Internet chat rooms.
After a failed crackdown on the so-called red-shirt protesters last month, the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is leading a two-pronged campaign it hopes will strangle support for the protest movement. The government is sharpening its public relations message while trying to shut down the opposition’s media, a plan that in some parts of the country appears to be backfiring.
A constant crawl at the bottom of television screens, which started running in March on two government-owned stations, makes the case that “malevolent” protesters are hurting the country and should go home. And an advertisement implores: “Thais should love each other because we all live in the same country.”
At the same time the government has shut down an opposition television station and at least 420 Web sites affiliated with the red shirt movement.
Officials are also accusing red shirts of trying to overthrow the monarchy, an incendiary charge that protest leaders reject.
In an interview with foreign correspondents on Sunday, Mr. Abhisit suggested that the government would try to shut down community radio stations, which have multiplied throughout the country in recent months, especially in the populous red-shirt stronghold of the northeast.
He accused the radio stations of being “command centers” for the red shirts and playing a “coordinating role” in the unrest.
“We are trying to restore order,” he said. “I’m not going to say that no media is allowed to attack or comment on the other side. But certainly no media should be allowed to play the role of inciting violence.”
The prime minister also said he had not ruled out using force to end the standoff in Bangkok. “We are now in the process of cutting off support and sealing the area off before we actually move in,” he said.
But a crackdown does not appear imminent, especially after 25 people died and 800 were injured in the botched attempt to clear protesters on April 10.
Mr. Abhisit said Sunday that he remained patient and that the “best solution is one that does not involve violence or confrontation or conflicts.” An aide said the prime minister would soon release a “political roadmap” that could bring reconciliation to the country after four years of turmoil.
The overarching strategy for the government appears to be demonizing the protesters and hoping that public opinion swings against them, a process that could take months. Mr. Abhisit and his advisers warn of “terrorists” among the protesters.
So far, the public relations campaign has had mixed results. In Bangkok there is growing anger at the red shirts over the barricaded streets and their incursion last week into a hospital, which caused panic in the wards. But there is also deepening frustration over the government’s inability to drive out the protesters.
“The government is good at building up their image from these messages on television, but no one is taking any action to solve the problem,” said Yont Klomkleaw, a manager for a market research company in Bangkok.
On Sunday, the prime minister’s Facebook page had about 600 comments, many of them supportive; “fight! fight!” was a common refrain. But there were also critical postings. “Sometimes, words alone may not be enough,” wrote one commenter, Anyarporn Tansirikongkol.
In the provinces, especially the red shirts’ base in the north and northeast, the government’s efforts may be backfiring, with many villagers rejecting the messages as spin and propaganda, a view encouraged by the movement’s leaders.
“The government is just lying to the people,” said Jarungkiat Chatchawat, who runs a food stall in the northeastern city of Khon Kaen. “It doesn’t have any influence on me.”
One military intelligence officer described the red shirt movement as spreading “like a virus” in the northeast.
The red shirts broadcast their message using community radio stations and, until recently, the satellite television station PTV, which was shut down by the government last month.
Their public-relations campaign has focused on a few key words, notably the “double standards” in Thai society applied to the poor compared with the rich and well-connected. They also call the Abhisit government illegitimate because it came after court decisions that barred two prime ministers from the opposition camp.
The red shirts say they want to bring genuine democracy to Thailand, a message that sells well in the north and northeast, where many farmers and villagers feel their voice was muted by the 2006 military coup.
In Bangkok there is more skepticism about the protesters’ motives.
“This is not about democracy, it’s about thuggery,” Voranai Vanijaka, a columnist for The Bangkok Post, wrote in the Sunday edition of the newspaper. “It’s about nothing less than forcing the government to bend to their every whim and every will.”
Mr. Voranai suggested the red shirt movement was a vendetta by Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire who was removed as prime minister in the 2006 coup, after a court in February ordered a large share of his assets seized by the state.
Although the references are often oblique, Mr. Thaksin and his allies appear to be the target of many of the government’s messages. One message running on the bottom of television screens warns:
“Don’t become a tool, don’t be naive and don’t hurt the country for the sake of only one person.”
TWITTER users now broadcast about 55 million Tweets a day. In just four years, about 10 billion of these brief messages have accumulated.
Not a few are pure drivel. But, taken together, they are likely to be of considerable value to future historians. They contain more observations, recorded at the same times by more people, than ever preserved in any medium before.
“Twitter is tens of millions of active users. There is no archive with tens of millions of diaries,” said Daniel J. Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and co-author of a 2006 book, “Digital History.” What’s more, he said, “Twitter is of the moment; it’s where people are the most honest.”
Last month, Twitter announced that it would donate its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress, and supply it with continuous updates.
Several historians said the bequest had tremendous potential. “My initial reaction was, ‘When you look at it Tweet by Tweet, it looks like junk,’ said Amy Murrell Taylor, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Albany. “But it could be really valuable if looked through collectively.”
Ms. Taylor is working on a book about slave runaways during the Civil War; the project involves mountains of paper documents. “I don’t have a search engine to sift through it,” she said.
The Twitter archive, which was “born digital,” as archivists say, will be easily searchable by machine — unlike family letters and diaries gathering dust in attics.
As a written record, Tweets are very close to the originating thoughts. “Most of our sources are written after the fact, mediated by memory — sometimes false memory,” Ms. Taylor said. “And newspapers are mediated by editors. Tweets take you right into the moment in a way that no other sources do. That’s what is so exciting.”
Twitter messages preserve witness accounts of an extraordinary variety of events all over the planet. “In the past, some people were able on site to write about, or sketch, as a witness to an event like the hanging of John Brown,” said William G. Thomas III, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “But that’s a very rare, exceptional historical record.”
Ten billion Twitter messages take up little storage space: about five terabytes of data. (A two-terabyte hard drive can be found for less than $150.) And Twitter says the archive will be a bit smaller when it is sent to the library. Before transferring it, the company will remove the messages of users who opted to designate their account “protected,” so that only people who obtain their explicit permission can follow them.
A Twitter user can also elect to use a pseudonym and not share any personally identifying information. Twitter does not add identity tags that match its users to real people.
Each message is accompanied by some tidbits of supplemental information, like the number of followers that the author had at the time and how many users the author was following. While Mr. Cohen said it would be useful for a historian to know who the followers and the followed are, this information is not included in the Tweet itself.
But there’s nothing private about who follows whom among users of Twitter’s unprotected, public accounts. This information is displayed both at Twitter’s own site and in applications developed by third parties whom Twitter welcomes to tap its database.
Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, said, “From the beginning, Twitter has been a public and open service.” Twitter’s privacy policy states: “Our services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public.”
Mr. Macgillivray added, “That’s why, when we were revising our privacy policy, we toyed with the idea of calling it our ‘public policy.’ ” He said the company would have done so but California law required that it have a “privacy policy” labeled as such.
Even though public Tweets were always intended for everyone’s eyes, the Library of Congress is skittish about stepping anywhere in the vicinity of a controversy. Martha Anderson, director of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the library, said, “There’s concern about privacy issues in the near term and we’re sensitive to these concerns.”
The library will embargo messages for six months after their original transmission. If that is not enough to put privacy issues to rest, she said, “We may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available.” The library plans to dole out its access to its Twitter archive only to those whom Ms. Anderson called “qualified researchers.”
BUT the library’ s restrictions on access will not matter. Mr. Macgillivray at Twitter said his company would be turning over copies of its public archive to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, too. These companies already receive instantaneously the stream of current Twitter messages. When the archive of older Tweets is added to their data storehouses, they will have a complete, constantly updated, set, and users won’t encounter a six-month embargo.
Google already offers its users Replay, the option of restricting a keyword search only to Tweets and to particular periods. It’s quickly reached from a search results page. (Click on “Show options,” then “Updates,” then a particular place on the timeline.)
A tool like Google Replay is helpful in focusing on one topic. But it displays only 10 Tweets at a time. To browse 10 billion — let’s see, figuring six seconds for a quick scan of each screen — would require about 190 sleepless years.
Mr. Cohen encourages historians to find new tools and methods for mining the “staggeringly large historical record” of Tweets. This will require a different approach, he said, one that lets go of straightforward “anecdotal history.”
In the end, perhaps quality will emerge from sheer quantity.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
Cameras that can follow you from the minute you enter a store to the moment you hit the checkout counter, recording every T-shirt you touch, every mannequin you ogle, every time you blow your nose or stop to tie your shoelaces.
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Web coupons embedded with bar codes that can identify, and alert retailers to, the search terms you used to find them and, in some cases, even your Facebook information and your name.
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Mobile marketers that can find you near a store clothing rack, and send ads to your cellphone based on your past preferences and behavior.
To be sure, such retail innovations help companies identify their most profitable client segments, better predict the deals shoppers will pursue, fine-tune customer service down to a person and foster brand loyalty. (My colleagues Stephanie Rosenbloom and Stephanie Clifford have written in detail about the tracking prowess of store cameras and Web coupons.)
But these and other surveillance techniques are also reminders that advances in data collection are far outpacing personal data protection.
Enter the post-privacy society, where we have lost track of how many entities are tracking us. Not to mention what they are doing with our personal information, how they are storing it, whom they might be selling our dossiers to and, yes, how much money they are making from them.
On the way out, consumer advocates say, is that quaint old notion of informed consent, in which a company clearly notifies you of its policies and gives you the choice of whether to opt in (rather than having you opt out once you discover your behavior is being tracked).
“How does notice and choice work when you don’t even interface with the company that has your data?” says Jessica Rich, a deputy director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission.
The commission has brought several dozen complaints against companies about possibly deceptive or unfair data collection and nearly 30 complaints over data security issues. In 2009, the commission proposed new guidelines for Web advertising that is tailored to user behavior.
The problem is, the F.T.C.’s guidelines are merely recommendations. Corporations can choose to follow them — or not. And the online advertising standards don’t apply to off-line techniques like observation in stores.
Mike Zaneis, vice president for public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association based in Manhattan, says the advertising industry is not generally collecting personally identifiable data.
His group has worked closely with the F.T.C. on industry self-regulation, he says, and is developing new industry standards to alert consumers as they encounter ads based on their online behavior.
In the meantime, Mr. Zaneis says, consumers can use an industry program if they want to opt out of some behavior-based ads. As for mobile marketing, he says, consumers are always asked if they want to opt in to ads related to their cellphone location.
The larger issue here is not the invasion of any one person’s privacy as much as the explosive growth of a collective industry in behavioral information, says Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group that works to safeguard user privacy.
“The whole business model is unfettered data collection of all your activities online and off,” Mr. Chester says. For example, he says that when consumers opt into cellphone ads, they may not understand that marketers may link their locations with information from third-party databases. The result, he says, is mobile dossiers about individual consumers.
As contradictory as it might sound, we need new strategies for transparent consumer surveillance.
In a country where we have a comprehensive federal law — the Fair Credit Reporting Act — giving us the right to obtain and correct financial data collected about us, no general federal statute requires behavioral data marketers to show us our files, says Ms. Rich of the F.T.C.
So, is the European model, involving independent government agencies called Data Protection Commissions that are charged with safeguarding people’s personal information, better than ours?
Europe’s privacy commissioners have generally been more forward-looking, examining potential privacy intrusions like biometric tracking, while the F.T.C. is still trying to understand the magnitude and the implications of the Web, says Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research group in Washington.
“The U.S. system with regard to privacy is not working,” Mr. Rotenberg says.
By early fall, the F.T.C. plans to propose comprehensive new privacy guidelines intended to provide greater tools for transparency and better consumer control of personal information, Ms. Rich says.
In the meantime, what if consumers take a more active interest in who is collecting information about them?
In a recent documentary called “Erasing David,” the London-based filmmaker David Bond attempts to disappear from Britain’s surveillance grid, hiring experts from the security firm Cerberus to track him using all the information they can glean about him while he tries to outrun them. In the course of the film, the detectives even obtain a copy of the birth certificate of his daughter, then 18 months old.
But the real shocker is the information Mr. Bond is able to obtain about himself — by taking advantage of a data protection law in Britain that requires public agencies and private businesses to release a person’s data file upon his or her written request.
In one scene, Mr. Bond receives a phonebook-thick printout from Amazon.com listing everything he ever bought on the site; the addresses of every person to whom he ever sent a gift; and even the products he perused but did not ultimately buy.
He also receives a file from his bank, including a transcript of an irate phone call he once made after the bank lost one of his checks. The transcript noted that he seemed angry and raised his voice.
“It read like a mini-Stasi file,” Mr. Bond said when I called him last week. When recorded messages inform us that we may be taped “for training or quality assurance purposes,” he reminded me, we should remember that our conversation may end up in our dossiers.
INSPIRED by Mr. Bond’s odyssey, I called some companies with whom I do business.
A customer service representative at a bookstore chain where I have a discount card told me that the company maintains a list of the amount each member spends on each transaction so that the store can tell people how much money they saved at the end of the year. But a loyalty cardholder is not permitted to obtain his or her own purchase history.
Then I called an online travel agency and asked if I could get copies of my flight history and phone transcripts. I was regretting a disgruntled call I made to the agency a few months ago after being stranded at an airport in a blizzard. The customer care rep said clients couldn’t obtain their own transcripts unless it was for legal purposes.
Was I being taped this time, too? They always tape, he said.
BERLIN — With the majority of Internet traffic expected to shift to congestion-prone mobile networks, there is growing debate on both sides of the Atlantic about whether operators of the networks should be allowed to treat Web users differently, based on the users’ consumption.
Proponents of the current system — called network neutrality — see that principle as a kind of civil rights declaration of the digital age, one that requires the gatekeepers of the global Internet to treat all users equally, regardless of application, source or download limit.
While operators have never been required to maintain neutrality, the industry has created that expectation largely by charging users a flat rate for unlimited Internet access.
But there is a big flaw in the concept, according to the operators: Networks have never been neutral. They have always been actively managed to some extent since their inception in the 1980s to ensure that all customers get a basic “best effort” level of service.
If an operator could not restrain bandwidth hogs, who typically make up 15 percent of customers but who generate 80 percent of the traffic, most Internet users would experience poor service.
“The Internet has never been a neutral environment left to develop freely on a first-come, first-serve basis,” said Stuart Orr, the head of the telecommunications group in Europe, Africa and Latin America for Accenture, a U.S. software services consultant.
The arcane issue of network management, and the free speech and competition issues it raises, has taken on broader political importance as operators have increasingly micromanaged the flow of data, favoring some users over others as they have sought to handle exploding levels of traffic or deliver premium broadband service at guaranteed speeds to heavy users and businesses.
In the United States, users of the BitTorrent file-sharing service, a large generator of broadband traffic, last year challenged a cable operator, Comcast, that had blocked the service by identifying and disabling a common protocol used by BitTorrent users.
The Federal Communications Commission ordered Comcast to stop the blocking. Comcast challenged the ruling. On April 6, an appeals court in Washington sided with the operator, saying the F.C.C. could not tell Comcast how to manage its network.
In Brussels, the European commissioner for the digital agenda, Neelie Kroes, plans to hold a public consultation on net neutrality this summer, which could lead to a push for new laws or regulations for operators.
Earlier this year, Ms. Kroes warned mobile operators not to block or hinder Internet voice services like Skype from their networks.
Operators are worried that any rigid legal mandate that forced them to observe net neutrality standards would be unworkable and make the economics of high-speed wireless broadband less attractive, which could limit future investment and improvement to the networks.
“We have no interest as an industry in policing individual surfing habits or acting as the gatekeeper for information,” said Frederic Gastaldo, the head of strategy and innovation at Swisscom. “Historically, our industry has resisted attempts to force operators to act as the personal gatekeepers of information. That would be a very negative marketing approach. However, customers who do excessively use our data network are a big challenge for us.”
Congestion is more problematic for mobile than landline broadband operators because wireless broadband capacity is limited by the ability of individual base stations to process the Web activities of hundreds of users simultaneously. The more users per station, the less performance for each user.
To avoid bottlenecks, operators use techniques like “traffic shaping,” which sorts traffic to ensure basic service for all, or “throttling,” which applies a general brake on large streams of data.
Kabel Deutschland, the largest German cable TV operator, has one million broadband customers. Its coaxial and glass-fiber network is so far able to satisfy all customers without restrictions, said Georg Merdian, director of the company’s infrastructure regulation.
But he said that the number of its broadband customers was doubling each year. “We anticipate we will soon have to use some kind of management techniques,” Mr. Merdian said.
For most mobile operators, traffic management is a fact of life.
Vodafone, one of the largest mobile operators in Europe and a part owner of Verizon Wireless, the No.1 wireless operator in America, routinely alerts its customers when they exceed the download limits of their service packages.Like all other operators, Vodafone uses sophisticated software that can pluck users or applications from the digital clamor.
“We use a form of network management to say, ‘I’m sorry, you are not going to be able to get the same level of service unless you decide to top up,”’ said Richard Feasey, Vodafone’s public policy director in London.
As data traffic levels rise, some executives, like César Alierta, the chairman and chief executive of the Spanish operator Telefónica, and Vittorio Colao, the Vodafone chief executive, have floated the idea of charging not only customers but also Web sites that generate lots of data traffic, like Google, Amazon and Facebook, for faster, guaranteed service.
Web businesses, which depend on fast Internet paid for by individual customers, oppose the idea and have been pushing lawmakers in Brussels and Washington to adopt restrictions preventing operators from making deals with content providers.
Prohibitions like that would make an operator’s business untenable, eventually reducing cable and phone networks to unprofitable, crowded data freeways, said Robert Mourik, the director of Telefónica’s regulatory policy in Europe.
“We have an explosion of traffic, but our revenues have not been growing at the same pace or staying flat,” Mr. Mourik said. “We are not looking at content on the Internet. We are not trying to police the network. What we are looking to do are commercial deals.”
Whether operators can successfully sell preferred Internet access to big Web businesses remains to be seen. Such a move would drastically alter the economics of the Internet, forcing content providers, in effect, to pay a toll, and perhaps a heavy toll, for access.
Naturally, none of the big Web sites are interested in doing that.
In February at an industry convention in Barcelona, Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, was asked to comment on statements made by Mr. Colao of Vodafone, who had called for the right to clinch commercial deals with big Web businesses like Google.
Mr. Schmidt, who during a speech that day had stressed Google’s role in helping network operators build their wireless broadband businesses by attracting consumers to the mobile Web, declined to comment, adding that Mr. Colao was a friend.
Nearly half of Harvard’s collection is housed at the Harvard Depository, a marvel of efficient off-campus storage. Library assistant Carl Wood reshelves books in the 30-foot-high, 200-foot-long stacks.
“Throw it in the charles,” one scientist recently suggested as a fitting end for Widener Library’s collection. The remark was outrageous—especially at an institution whose very name honors a gift of books—but it was pointed. Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Widener’s collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Google’s massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform. “People want information ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere,’” says Helen Shenton, the former head of collection care for the British Library who is now deputy director of the Harvard University Library. Users are changing—but so, too, are libraries. The future is clearly digital.
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Medical Library, sees librarians returning to a central role in medicine as curators of databases and as teachers of complex bioinformatics search techniques.
Yet if the format of the future is digital, the content remains data.And at its simplest, scholarship in any discipline is about gaining access to information and knowledge, says Peter Bol, Carswell professor of East Asian languages and civilizations. In fields such as botany or comparative zoology, researchers need historical examples of plant and animal life, so they build collections and cooperate with others who also have collections. “We can call that a museum of comparative zoology,” he says, “but it is a form of data collection.” If you study Chinese history, as Bol does, you need access to primary sources and to the record of scholarship on human history over time. You need books. But in physics or chemistry, where the research horizon is constantly advancing, much of the knowledge created in the past has very little relevance to current understanding. In that case, he says, “you want to be riding the crest of the tidal wave of information that is coming in right now. We all want access to information, and in some cases that will involve building collections; in others, it will mean renting access to information resources that will keep us current. In some cases, these services may be provided by a library, in others by a museum or even a website.”
Meanwhile, “Who has the most scientific knowledge of large-scale organization, collection, and access to information? Librarians,” says Bol. A librarian can take a book, put it somewhere, and then guarantee to find it again. “If you’ve got 16 million items,” he points out, “that’s a very big guarantee. We ought to be leveraging that expertise to deal with this new digital environment. That’s a vision of librarians as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.”
Librarians as Information Brokers
Bol is particularly interested in the media form known as Google Book Search (GBS). The search-engine giant is systematically scanning books from libraries throughout the world in order to assemble an enormous, Internet-accessible digital library: at 12 million books, its collection is already three-quarters the size of Harvard’s. Soon it will be the largest library the world has ever known. Harvard has provided nearly a million public domain (pre-1923) books for the project; by participating, the University helped with the creation of a new tool (GBS) for locating books that is useful to people both at Harvard and around the world. And participation made the full text content of these books searchable and available to everyone in the United States for free.
GBS appeals to Bol and other scholars because it gives them quick and easy access to books that Harvard does not own (litigation over the non-public-domain works in GBS notwithstanding). For Bol, such a tool might be especially useful: Harvard acquires only 15,000 books from China each year, but he estimates that it ought to be collecting closer to 50,000. So GBS could be a boon to scholarship.
But GBS also raises all kinds of questions. If everything eventually is available at your fingertips, what will be the role of libraries and librarians?
“Internet search engines like Google Books fundamentally challenge our understanding of where we add value to this process,” says Dan Hazen, associate librarian of collection development for Harvard College. Librarians have worked hard to assemble materials of all kinds so that it is “not a random bunch of stuff, but can actually support and sustain some kind of meaningful inquiry,” he explains. “The result was a collection that was a consciously created, carefully crafted, deliberately maintained, constrained body of material.”
Internet search explodes the notion of a curated collection in which the quality of the sources has been assured. “What we’re seeing now with Google Scholar and these mass digitization projects, and the Internet generally,” says Hazen, “is, ‘Everything’s out there.’ And everything has equal weight. If I do a search on Google, I can get a scholarly journal. I can get somebody’s blog posting….The notion of collection that’s implicit in ‘the universe is at my fingertips’ is diametrically opposed, really, to the notion of collection as ‘consciously curated and controlled artifact.’” Even the act of reading for research is changed, he points out. Scholars poring through actual newspapers “could see how [an item] was presented on the page, and the prominence it had, and the flow of content throughout a series of articles that might have to do with the same thing—and then differentiate those from the books or other kinds of materials that talked about the same phenomenon. When you get into the Internet world, you tend to get a gazillion facts, mentions, snippets, and references that don’t organize themselves in that same framework of prominence, and typology, and how stuff came to be, and why it was created, and what the intrinsic logic of that category of materials is. How and whether that kind of structuring logic can apply to this wonderful chaos of information is something that we’re all trying to grapple with.”
How does searching digitally in a book relate to the act of reading? “There may be a single fact that’s important,” Hazen explains. “Is the book’s overall argument something that’s equally important as the single factor is it just irrelevant? When people worry about reading books online, part of the worry is that the nuances of a well-developed argument that goes on linearly for 300 pages [are missing]. That’s not the way you interact with a text online.” How the flood of information from digitized books will be integrated into libraries, which have a separate and different, though not necessarily contradictory, logic remains to be seen. “For librarians, and the library, trying to straddle these two visions of what we’re about is something that we’re still trying to figure out.”
Photograph by Jim Harrison
The printed book took hundreds of years to replace handwritten manuscripts, which persisted as an economical way to produce small numbers of copies into the nineteenth century, nearly 400 years after Gutenberg invented movable type. Robert Darnton, director of the University Library, shown with Diderot’s Encyclopédie, predicts great longevity for the book.
Moreover, the prospect that, increasingly, libraries will be stewards of vast quantities of data, a great deal from books, and some unique, raises very serious concerns about the long-term preservation of digital materials. “What worries us all,” says Nancy M. Cline, Larsen librarian of Harvard College, “is that we really haven’t tested the longevity for a lot of these digital resources.” This is a universal problem and the subject of much international attention and research. “If you walk into the book stacks,” she points out, “you can simply smell in some areas the deterioration of the paper and leather. But with something that hums away on a server, we don’t have the same potential to observe” (see “Digital Preservation: An Unsolved Problem,” page 82).
Despite these caveats, Bol’s vision of future librarians as digital-information brokers rather than stewards of physical collections is already taking shape in the scientific disciplines, where the concerns raised by Hazen are less important. In fields faced with information overload—such as biology, coping with a barrage of genomic data, and astronomy, in which an all-sky survey telescope can generate a terabyte of data in a single night—the torrents of raw information are impossible to absorb and understand without computational aids.
Medicine has had to cope with this problem ever since nineteenth-century general practitioners found they could no longer keep up with the sheer quantity of published medical literature. Specialization eventually allowed doctors to focus only on the journals in their particular area of expertise. Throughout such transitions, libraries played an important role. Doctors, upon completing their rounds, would comb the stacks for records of similar cases that might help with diagnosis and treatment. Today, the amount of new information being generated in the biological sciences is prescribing another momentous shift that may provide a glimpse of the future in other disciplines. For a doctor, learning about a genetic test and then interrogating a database to understand the results could save a life. For libraries and librarians, the new premium on skills they have long cultivated as curators, preservers, and retrievers of collective knowledge puts them squarely on top of an information geyser in the sciences that could reshape medicine.
Mining the Bibliome
Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School (HMS), recently asked a pointed question on his blog: Who is the better doctor—the one who can remember more diagnostic tests or the one “who is the quickest and most savvy at online searching for the relevant tests?” He predicts that “we are going to be uncomfortable with some of the answers to these questions for many years to come” because success based not on bedside manner, but on competence interacting with a database, implies a potential devaluing of skills that society has honored. And who is pondering these issues most acutely? A blogging librarian and pediatric endocrinologist with a Ph.D. in computer science.
One hundred years ago, says Kohane, a report on medical education in the United States concluded that doctors were inadequately prepared to care for patients. Half the medical schools in the country closed. “I think we are at a similar inflection point,” he says. “If you look at bioinformatics and genetics, you see vivid examples—which can be generalized to other parts of medicine—where the system has inadequately educated and empowered its workers in the use of search, electronic resources, and automated knowledge management.” Genetic testing, he adds, offers a “prismatic example”: studies in the Netherlands and the United States have shown that “physicians are ordering genetic tests because patients are asking them to, [even though] they don’t know how to interpret the tests and are uncomfortable doing so.”
Kohane sees similar problems when making the rounds with medical students, fellows, and residents: “When we run into a problematic complex patient with a clearly genetic problem from birth, and I ask what the problem might be and what tests are to be ordered, their reflex is either to search their memories for what they learned in medical school or to look at a textbook that might be relevant. They don’t have what I would characterize as the ‘Google reflex,’ which is to go to the right databases to look things up.” The students doubtless use Google elsewhere in their lives, but in medicine, he explains, “the whole idea of just-in-time learning and using these websites is not reflexive. That is highly troublesome because the time when you could keep up even with a subspecialty like pediatric neurosurgery by reading a couple of journals is long, long gone.”
The journals themselves have grown in number and quantity of articles, but “the amount of data being produced and analyzed in large, curated databases,” Kohane says, “exceeds by several orders of magnitude what appears in printed publications.” The fact that students and doctors don’t think to use this digital material is an international problem. “Even at Harvard,” where “we spend millions of dollars” annually for access to the databases, “many of the medical staff, graduate students, and residents don’t know how to use…,” he pauses. “Well, it’s worse than that. They don’t know that they exist.”
But in this lamentable situation Kohane sees an opportunity for medical libraries, whose role, he believes, had faded for a while. “It is becoming so clear that medicine and medical research are an information-processing enterprise, that there’s an opportunity for a library that would embrace that as a mission…to be again a center of the medical enterprise.”
Kohane has sought to do just that by creating an information institute—an HMS-wide center for biomedical informatics—embedded within Countway Library. The institute offers voluntary mini-courses, invariably oversubscribed, explaining what the relevant databases are, how to plumb them, and how to analyze the data they produce. A parallel effort under his supervision seeks to “mine the bibliome”—the totality of the electronically published medical literature—by allowing researchers to track down relationships between genes and diseases in the published literature that would not be apparent when searching one reference at a time. Librarians in the institute also comb databases for contradictions, and find references to sites in the genome that can’t possibly exist because the coordinates are wrong. In making sure that information is good, the library is “returning to its original mission of curation,” says Kohane, “but in a genomic era and around bioinformatics.” This defines a new role for librarians as database experts and teachers, while the library becomes a place for learning about sophisticated search for specialized information.
Such skills-based teaching, learning, and data curation depend on finding individuals who are trained in medicine and also have the public-minded qualities of a librarian—rare indeed, as Kohane readily acknowledges. And even though the cost of such bioinformatics education is small relative to the millions of dollars spent on subscription fees for electronic periodicals (the price of which doubled between 2000 and 2010, says Kohane; see “Open Access,” May-June 2008, page 61 for more on the crisis in scholarly communication), the resources to provide more educational support for complex types of database search training are insufficient across the University. “That’s because we are trying to bolt on a solution to a problem that probably should be addressed foursquare within the core educational process,” he says.
There is growing awareness of the need to have an “information-processing approach to medicine baked into the core education of doctoral and medical students.” Otherwise, Kohane says, “we’re condemning them to perpetual partial ignorance.” Already, a few lectures on the topic are being introduced into the medical-school curriculum, making HMS a pioneer in this area. Discussions about bringing more of the biological/biomedical informatics agenda to the undergraduate campus are also under way.
Even in the relatively tradition-bound profession of law, digitization cuts so deeply that when Ess librarian and professor of law John G. Palfrey VII restructured the Law School library last year, he says he thought about the mission less as “How do we build the greatest collection of books in law?” and more as “How do we make information as useful as possible to our community now and over a long period of time?”
This focus on information services within a community guided both personnel decisions and collections strategies. “We scrapped the entire organizational structure,” reports Palfrey (whose digital genes can be traced back to his former position as executive director of the law school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society). Last June 30, all the librarians handed in resignations for the jobs they had held and received new assignments. There is now a librarian who works with faculty members, teaching empirical research methods, and another who helps students and faculty conduct empirical research. The collection development group includes “a lab for hacking a library”: a member of that team is working on an idea called “Stack View” that would allow the re-creation of serendipitous browsing in a digital format. Technology “allows you to reorganize information and present it in a totally different way,” Palfrey points out.
The law library’s new collection-development policy is organized along a continuum of materials for which the library takes increasing responsibility. These range from resources in the public domain that aren’t collected, but to which the library provides access; to materials accessed under license; and all the way up to unique holdings of an historic or special nature that the library archives, preserves, and may one day digitize in order to provide online access. The fact that the library no longer buys everything published in the law has been made explicit. “It is no longer possible financially, nor is it desirable—not all of it is useful,” Palfrey says bluntly. Only a third of newly purchased books are initially bound. “We’ll put a barcode on it, put it on the shelf, and see if people use it,” he explains. “If they do, and the book starts to wear, then we’ll send it to the bindery.”
Even though these changes may seem like cutbacks (they were in fact planned and in process before the University’s financial crisis became apparent), he believes skilled librarians are in no danger of becoming obsolete: “The role of the librarian is much greater in this digital era than it has ever been before.” Good lawyers need to be good at information processing, and Palfrey found in research for his book Born Digital that students today are not very good at using complex legal databases. “They try to use the same natural-language search techniques” they learned from using Google, he says, rather than thinking about research as “a series of structured queries. It’s not that we don’t need libraries or librarians,” he continues, “it’s that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren’t getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.”
Mary Lee Kennedy, executive director of knowledge and library services at Harvard Business School, whose very title suggests a new kind of approach, agrees with Palfrey. “The digital world of content is going to be overwhelming for librarians for a long time, just because there is so much,” she acknowledges. Therefore, librarians need to teach students not only how to search, but “how to think critically about what they have found…what they are missing… and how to judge their sources.”
Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”
Photograph by Jim Harrison
“A man will turn over half a library to make one book,” said Samuel Johnson. Nancy Cline, Larsen librarian of Harvard College, displays a manuscript letter from the Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson; all its Johnson letters are available online as part of the University Library’s open-collections program.
“Just in Time” Libraries
All this is not to suggest that the traditional role of libraries as collections where objects are stored, preserved, and retrieved on request is going away. But it is certainly changing. Two facilities—one digital, the other analog—suggest a bifurcated future. The two could not be more different, though their mandates are identical.
In Cambridge, the Digital Repository Service (DRS) is a rapidly growing, 109-terabyte online library of 14 million files representing books, daguerreotypes, maps, music, images, and manuscripts, among other things, all owned by Harvard. In a facility that also serves other parts of the University, a two-person command center monitors more than a hundred servers. Green lights indicate all is well; red flashes when environmental conditions such as temperature or humidity exceed designated parameters. In a nearby room, warm and alive with the whirr of hundreds of cooling fans, their cumulative sound resembling the roar of a giant waterfall, a handful of servers hold the library’s entire digital collection. Other servers are dedicated to “discovery,” the technical term for the searchable online catalog, or “delivery,” the act of providing a file to an end user.
There are at least three copies of the entire repository—one in, and two outside of, Cambridge. One of them, secured by thumbprint access, is constantly being read by machines at the disk level to ensure the integrity of the data, a process that takes a full month to complete. “Several times a year,” says Tracey Robinson, who heads the library’s office for information systems, “we detect data that have become corrupted. We engage in a constant process of refreshing and making sure that everything is readable.” Any damaged material is quickly replaced with another copy from the backup.
The analog counterpart to the DRS is the Harvard Depository (HD), located in the countryside about 45 minutes from Boston. A low, modular building with loading dock bays, it resembles a warehouse more than anything else. In many ways, that is precisely what it is. Just two librarians oversee 7.5 million books held in an energy-efficient, climate-controlled environment—more than twice as many as are held at Widener, which is three times as large. “The libraries based in the city are among the most expensive in terms of linear capacity,” says Nancy Cline. “The Depository as a concept is absolutely essential for us.” A number of other libraries in the Boston area, including MIT, use the HD. The facility absorbs half a million new books each year, circulates 220,000, and boasts a 100 percent retrieval rate. (In 24 years, just two books could not be found for delivery; in a typical library, one study showed, patrons find what they are looking for only 50 percent of the time.)
The secret to the HD’s extraordinary density and retrieval rate is simple: here, a book is not a book. Titles, subjects, authors—none of this so-called “metadata,” the information people typically use to find things, matters. “We know how many books we get in,” says assistant director of the University Library for the Harvard Depository Tom Schneiter, who directs the facility, “but we don’t know what they are. To us, they are just barcodes. It makes our work much more efficient.” A staff of dedicated workers, who rotate through different tasks in order to break up the routine, can check in as many as 800 barcodes an hour. All the items are sorted and shelved according to size in bins that are themselves barcoded. This allows the height of the shelves to be perfectly calibrated to the height of the books; no wasted airspace. Place a request for one of the books in the HD and it will be delivered the next business day to the campus library of your choosing.
Originally, the HD was intended to store only low-circulation items. But because the libraries of the Cambridge campus are “full to bursting,” says Pforzheimer University Professor Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University library, “doing triage” on thousands of little-used books from the shelves each year to make room for new ones proved impractical. Now, most new books are simply sent to the HD. Although some professors lament the death of shelf-browsing, others are grateful when a book they love is sent off, because they know that when next they want it, not only will it be found, it will be well-preserved: time essentially stands still for the books at the HD, where an environment set at 50 degrees and 35 percent relative humidity is expected to maintain a book in the condition in which it arrived for 244 years.
The price of such longevity and retrievability is about 30 cents per stored volume per year, which compares favorably to the cost of digital storage; expense estimates from the HathiTrust (a national group of research libraries that have created a joint repository for digital collections) for storing a digital book scanned by Google range from 15 cents for black and white to 40 cents for color annually. Actually delivering a physical book from the HD, on the other hand, costs $2.15—much more than the delivery of a digital book to a computer screen.
But making comparisons between digital and analog libraries on issues of cost or use or preservation is not straightforward. If students want to read a book cover to cover, the printed copy may be deemed superior with respect to “bed, bath and beach,” John Palfrey points out. If they just want to read a few pages for class, or mine the book for scattered references to a single subject, the digital version’s searchability could be more appealing; alternatively, students can request scans of the pages or chapter they want to read as part of a program called “scan and deliver” (in use at the HD and other Harvard libraries) and receive a link to images of the pages via e-mail within four days.
One can imagine a not too radically different future in which patronless libraries such as the DRS and the HD would hold almost everything, supplying materials on request to their on-campus counterparts. Print on demand technology (POD) would allow libraries to change their collection strategies: they could buy and print a physical copy of a book only if a user requested it. When the user was done with the book, it would be shelved. It’s a vision of “doing libraries ‘just in time’ rather than ‘just in case,’” says Palfrey. (At the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue, a POD machine dubbed Paige M. Gutenborgis already in use. Find something you like in Google’s database of public-domain books—perhaps one provided by Harvard—and for $8 you can own a copy, printed and bound before your wondering eyes in minutes. Clear Plexiglas allows patrons to watch the process—hot glue, guillotine-like trimming blades, and all—until the book is ejected, like a gumball, from a chute at the bottom.)
Indeed, the HD might one day play a role as the fulcrum for “radical collaboration” with the five other law libraries in the Boston area, says Palfrey. “We’re asking, ‘Could we imagine deciding, as a group of six, that we’re actually going to buy something and put it in the Harvard Depository,’” a central location from which the physical book could be delivered to any institution? “It would cost us a sixth as much.” Other Harvard libraries could explore the same strategy.
That doesn’t mean Harvard’s campus libraries would become less important. Because they are embedded in the residential academic community, they remain integral to University life. Students (and faculty members) are big users of the physical spaces in libraries, though they are using them differently than in the past.
“Libraries are not conservative places anymore,” says Cline. “From the user perspective, it is an interesting time. Some people still want the quiet, elegant reading room. Others would be frustrated if they had to be quiet in every part of the buildings, in part because their work requires that they talk, that they work in collaborative teams, that they share some of their research strategies. We’re rethinking the physical spaces to accommodate more of the type of learning that is expected now, the types of assignments that faculty are making, that have two or three students huddled around a computer working together, talking.”
Libraries are also being used as social spaces, adds Helen Shenton, where people can “get a cup of coffee, connect to WiFi, and meet their friends” outside their living space. In terms of research, students are asking each other for information more now than in the past, when they might have asked a librarian. “The flip side,” Shenton continues, “is that some places are embedding their library and information specialists within disciplines and within faculties. So I think the whole model is like one of those snow globes. You pick it up and shake it around and all the pieces will settle in a different way, which is incredibly exciting.”
A Future for Books
“A big misconception is that digital information and analog information are incompatible,” says Darnton, himself an historian of the book. “On the contrary, the whole history of books and communication shows that one medium does not displace another.” Manuscript publishing survived Gutenberg, continuing into the nineteenth century. “It was often cheaper to publish a book of under a hundred copies by hiring scribes,” he says, than it was to set the type and hire people to run the press. Likewise, horsepower increased in the age of railroads. “There were more horses hauling passengers in the second half of the nineteenth century than there were in the first half. And there is good evidence that now, if a book appears electronically on your computer screen, and it’s available for free, it will stimulate sales of the printed version.”
Jeffrey Hamburger—a scholar of an even earlier medium, the medieval manuscript—who was recently named chair of a library advisory group, says that “the notion that we are going to abandon the codex as we have known it—the traditional book—and go digital overnight is very misguided. It is going to be a much longer transition than anyone suspects, just as the transition in the past between the oral tradition of literature in antiquity and silent reading as we’ve known it for almost two millennia was a long transition, taking the better part of a millennium itself.”
Hamburger, the Francke professor of German art and culture, has worked extensively here and in Germany on projects involving the application of new media to the study of medieval manuscripts, but he says there are “still many, many things that new media cannot do as effectively as a good old-fashioned book”: for example, combining text and an associated image on opposing pages. “It’s instructive how many of the words we use to describe computer interfaces—tabs, bookmarks, scrolling—are derived from our experience with the book, and that’s not just because of experience or familiarity,” he adds. “It’s because they have a certain practicality, and all of those, it so happens, are inventions of the Middle Ages.” Computers, in reverting to scrolling, have “gone back to a much older technology, which had its merits but was deficient in its own ways, which is why it was replaced.”
In advocating for the continued importance of books, and raising his concern that this could become the “lost decade” for acquisitions to Harvard’s library collections, Hamburger emphasizes that he is not framing the University’s current crisis in terms of books versus new media. “We need both, and we’ll continue to need both. I think we have to take as a premise that the library is a vast, far-flung, varied institution, as varied and diverse as the intellectual community of the University itself, working for a range of constituents almost impossible to conceive of, and it’s not just a service organization. I would even go so far as to call it the nervous system of our corporate body.”
It would be a terrible mistake, Hamburger continues, “if different factions within the faculty, be it scientists and humanists, be it Western- or non-Western-focused scholars, started squabbling over resources. As a university, we have by definition a catholic, all-embracing mission, and the question is how to coordinate resources, not compete for them. The greatness of this university in the past and in the future rests on the greatness of our library. Without the library—old, new, digital, printed—this institution wouldn’t be what it is.”
Jonathan Shaw ’89 is managing editor of this magazine.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev NIKOLAS K. GVOSDEV is Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed here are entirely his own.
When Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence in February 2008, proponents of the move assumed that Serbia’s acquiescence to Kosovo’s final status was not absolutely necessary. The United States and many countries in Europe hoped Kosovo would gain quick recognition. These supportive governments thought that Kosovo would then have access to capital and investment, and that the northern, ethnically Serbian parts of the province would want to take part in the post-independence economic boom. Sadly, things have not gone according to plan.
Although the United States and many European countries did recognize the new state, some EU members -- such as Spain -- did not, due to fears of setting a harmful precedent that could weaken the doctrine of territorial integrity. Most other world powers have also declined to recognize an independent Kosovo, including Brazil, China, and India. Although some U.S. policymakers predicted that the Islamic world would embrace a new Muslim state -- and express gratitude to the United States for bringing about its birth -- almost no members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference have extended recognition. Even states that enjoy the patronage of the United States, such as Georgia and Iraq, have declined to support Washington by recognizing Kosovo (both countries face separatist problems of their own).
Being considered nonexistent has led Kosovo to struggle economically -- a situation made even worse by the lack of a formal agreement with Serbia on property claims. As U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon said recently, Kosovo is hampered by “high unemployment, low investment rates, and a relatively small economic base.” The government in Pristina requires Western aid to meet its expenses. Meanwhile, Kosovo remains a regional hub for narcotics, weapons, and human trafficking, with corruption a major deterrent to foreign investment.
Initially, many hoped that growing prosperity in Kosovo would entice those living in the Serb-majority region north of the Ibar River, as well as the residents of the ethnically Serb enclaves in the south, to reconcile themselves to the reality of Kosovan independence. But the weak economy has left this promise unfulfilled. Serbian participation in the electoral process has been minimal. Even many ethnic Albanians seem to be questioning the merits of independence: whereas 93 percent of Kosovo’s Albanians believed that independence had been a good thing two years ago, that number is 75 percent today.
Making matters more perilous is that, contrary to the assumptions of many proponents of independence, Belgrade has not reconciled itself to this fait accompli. Rather, it is challenging the legality of the unilateral declaration of indepedence, arguing that the rules-based international system was compromised when Kosovo’s status changed without agreement by both parties.
Serbia has asked the International Court of Justice to rule that Kosovo's declaration of independence was illegal according to international law. If the ICJ rules along these lines, then Kosovo would enter a permanent state of limbo (the court's decision is expected later this year). In such a scenario, Kosovo would not be able to join international bodies such as the UN, and its relationship with the EU would remain unsettled. Some countries may withdraw their recognition, as well.
But the ICJ process also creates a pretext for renewed negotiations that might break the existing deadlock. In pushing for talks, the United States and Europe must contend with two realities. First, the government in Pristina is not going to withdraw its declaration of independence, nor are states that have already recognized Kosovo -- beginning with the United States -- prepared to rescind their recognitions. Second, no government in Belgrade will recognize the current boundaries of Kosovo as legitimate. And in the aftermath of the 2004 riots, in which mobs attacked Serbian communities and churches, no Serbian administration can trust that ethnic Serbs and Serbian heritage sites will be safe in an independent Kosovo. To convince Belgrade otherwise would require outside security guarantees, but NATO is not prepared to make an open-ended commitment to deploying forces in Kosovo.
Whatever the outcome, Belgrade would benefit from resolving Kosovo’s status. Serbia’s relations with all of its neighbors -- and its position as the linchpin state of the western Balkans -- are complicated by the lingering Kosovo question. Its domestic politics are also negatively affected, as nationalists are able to attack pro-reform and pro-Western parties by championing the “fate of Kosovo.” Moreover, the U.S. strategy of compartmentalization -- whereby Kosovo is treated as an issue separate from the rest of the U.S.-Serbian relationship -- is not viable. The Obama administration cannot deepen cooperation with Serbia in order to stabilize the western Balkans yet “agree to disagree” on Kosovo.
To move forward, Washington must delink the question of independence from the question of frontiers. In other words, the debate over whether there should be an independent, Albanian-majority state of Kosovo must be handled separately from territorial issues. There are precedents for this approach: after World War I, the international community recognized that there would be an independent Armenia and Poland before the boundaries were definitely created; today, the Israel-Palestinian peace process works from a starting point of a two-state solution, although no final territorial settlement has been made. And yet, ever since the failed Rambouillet peace talks in 1999, diplomats have made the mistake of insisting that an independent Kosovo cover the entirety of the province as defined by the communist strongman Josip Broz Tito.
Belgrade and Pristina may come to an eventual agreement if the question of boundaries is split from the theoretical question of independence. Such talks should proceed without preconditions. This means that Serbia should not be required to change its constitution to cede legal and territorial claims to Kosovo (just as Ireland held on to its constitutional claims to the north of the island until 1998 without precluding talks with the United Kingdom). Nor should the government in Pristina be forced to abandon its earlier declarations.
Territorial adjustment, however, should certainly be on the table. The broad outline of a settlement is already clear: the Serb-majority regions north of the Ibar should remain part of Serbia, with some sort of arrangement made for important Serbian heritage sites and enclaves in the south.
One possible model for the latter is the agreement reached between Italy and the Vatican in 1929. For decades, the Catholic Church had not recognized the takeover of Rome by Italy in 1870; the Italian state was similarly uninclined to cede its claim over its capital city. The Lateran Treaty resolved this issue by establishing Vatican City as a neutral but independent state. Additionally, the Vatican received extraterritorial rights over sacred sites in and around Rome and in other parts of Italy. Of course, the Kosovo case is not identical, but the Lateran model could provide guidelines for a sustainable settlement.
An agreement between Belgrade and Pristina would resolve Kosovo’s state of limbo in the international community. It would simultaneously settle the critical issue that has slowed Serbia’s integration with Europe: Belgrade's ability to show that it controls all the territory under its jurisdiction, a requirement if it is to ensure enforcement of the acquis communautaire, the EU's body of common law. An agreement would also lift the current barriers to Kosovo's membership in the UN, signaling a final resolution to the issue.
Critics of such a plan would suggest that the very idea of redrawing boundaries is dangerous because it could call into question other disputed borders in the Balkans. But the reality on the ground is that Pristina has never controlled the territories north of the Ibar. And as shown by the continued need for NATO troops to protect Serb enclaves and monasteries in the south, Pristina does not really control those areas either. Would NATO member states launch a military campaign to conquer Mitrovica and the north in order to forcibly bring them under Pristina’s governance?
Some critics might also argue that adjusting Kosovo's boundaries would compromise its status as a viable state. Yet Kosovo is far less viable in its current condition. Moreover, if outstanding property disputes and border issues are resolved, international investors would feel more secure investing in Kosovo. Economic development, in turn, would have a positive effect on security and long-term stability.
And adjusting territorial boundaries would not necessarly spark new instability, because any agreement would respect the principles of the 1975 Helsinki accords by being voluntary and negotiated, not a forcible change imposed by one party on another. Recent statements by senior officials in Belgrade suggest that Serbia wants to resolve the lingering sources of instability in the western Balkans. It has repeatedly said that it is flexibile on the question of Kosovo. Meanwhile, Pristina cannot consolidate its position and begin true governance under the status quo. Restarting serious negotiations between the two sides -- with both parties prepared to offer concessions -- could finally move Kosovo toward a durable, lasting peace.
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