Digital Infrastructure for Diversity - on digital Bookshelf and Google Books

Abstract

Diversity is a core value of cultural policy, and the new global digital conditions for the creative industries mean new challenges for diversity at a national level. Internet has become a new infrastructure for services and platforms, and global actors as Google and Amazon are changing the play. This article is about the digitization of books, the collection of the National Library of Norway and cultural policy. It presents the results from two surveys on book and library consumption, qualitative interviews and document analysis, that capture five diversity dimensions. The results indicate the National Library’s digital collection is contributing to diversity in terms of demography, content, purpose for usage, dissemination and techno-cultural aspects. For policy makers, libraries and researchers the study demonstrates a national digital service’s contribution to expanded diversity.