Absent libraries, photocopied minds

What the case of the photocopying shop versus the academic presses demonstrates is the failure of the Indian library system and a parallel lack of intellectual growth

Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi Sep 25, 2012, 00:26 IST

Once the ragging was over, freshers at Delhi University (DU) often went through a more pleasant initiation rite — the handing over of stacks of photocopied notes and chapters from books, a legacy passed down from seniors to their juniors.

Those stacks were substantial enough to qualify as quasi-books in their own right. Some of these faux anthologies had the impressive patina of age and signs of a fledgling democracy of colleges in DU: notes that had been passed down from Kirori Mal through St Stephens via South Campus colleges from generation to generation.

So when two academic presses, Oxford University Press (OUP) and Cambridge University Press (CUP), sued the small photocopying shop that operates near the Delhi School of Economics and the University of Delhi for infringement of copyright, they appeared to have threatened a venerable tradition. Students protested, threatened a boycott of the two presses, defending photocopying as their right; and an argument began over the rights and iniquities of copyright.

Both sides have merit. The academic presses are correct to demand an end to this widespread and common practice of copyright violation — they have a duty, however unpopular this may be, to the authors and the books that they publish. But the students have a point when they say academic books are often priced out of their budget, or that it’s unreasonable to expect students to buy 20 books where only a chapter or so might be cited in each.

Copyright is not the issue, though it might be the legal battleground to this case. (If OUP and CUP win their case, the photocopying shops will close shutters in DU, and open doors elsewhere. The practice is likelier to go underground than to stop.) What the case of the photocopying shop versus the academic presses demonstrates is the failure of the Indian library system and a parallel lack of intellectual growth.

The problem that university students face in Delhi (and the rest of India) is not unique: especially for less affluent students, the cost of academic journals and books is prohibitive, and buying what would be required to cover the year’s syllabus is impractical.

For many of the world’s students, from universities in America and Oxford to places with very different college cultures – Portugal, Mexico, Belarus, Singapore – the library is their parallel university. In terms of scale, and just as important, the range of books on offer and the accessibility of the reading rooms to students, the public library or college library elsewhere has been as essential a part of the university experience as the actual classes and lectures.

The average Indian student cannot imagine what using a library elsewhere might be like: the Belarus library with its 8 million items and public concerts, the massive University of Coimbra library in Portugal with its 16th century charter – livraria pública para lentes, estudantes e quaisquer pessoas outras, the public library for lecturers, students and also everyone else – quite apart from the giant public libraries that also have space for art, sculptures, performances among the books. Even the best of DU’s libraries (or any Indian national or university library) cannot compare to any of the world’s good public libraries — it’s like comparing bullock carts and auto-rickshaws, which get the job done, to subway systems, which get the same job done on a completely different scale.

The Career Librarian blog describes what it took to build the Mexican library system — currently “the largest public library system in Latin America”. It required the enthusiastic backing of the state and the government over a decade, massive grants from foundations like the Gates Foundation. Most of all, a country that has had more than its share of problems with corruption and drug wars recognised that providing access to learning, computers and books for all their citizens is an urgent priority, not a luxury.

In the absence of a library culture – a place not just to read but to explore, not just to fetishise books but to own and examine the ideas inside them – the world of the Indian student is a shockingly narrow one. The real argument against photocopying texts isn’t, perhaps, the copyright one, which is only a legal argument.

When we read as students from those photocopied “books”, we read without an understanding of how much context and history had been lost. Often, chapters from academic studies and works floated in isolation, no link connecting one photocopied chapter and the next. No one referred to the uber-texts, the actual journals or books in which they had appeared. The “books” were focused around the core of the syllabus and their purpose was only to get students through the exams.

Arguments, essays and schools of thoughts were stapled together in those books, often without any reference to the larger world where those ideas had gestated and been born. If you were lucky enough to have good professors, a better map of thinkers might have been available; if not, there are only these ersatz books and their limited world-view, shaping the way the next generation of students will negotiate their lives.

Source: http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/nilanjana-s-roy-absent-libraries-photocopied-minds/487452/