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Library Issues

More on He Who Must Not Be Named

More great writing on Gorman from:

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Library Issues

Shirky FTW!

Clay Shirkey with a brilliant, well-reasoned reply to Gorman, for the win!

He even makes the same analogy I did regarding translations of the Bible. 🙂

If Gorman were looking at Web 2.0 and wondering how print culture could aspire to that level of accessibility, he would be doing something to bridge the gap he laments. Instead, he insists that the historical mediators of access “…promote intellectual development by exercising judgment and expertise to make the task of the seeker of knowledge easier.” This is the argument Catholic priests made to the operators of printing presses against publishing translations of the Bible — the laity shouldn’t have direct access to the source material, because they won’t understand it properly without us. Gorman offers no hint as to why direct access was an improvement when created by the printing press then but a degradation when created by the computer. Despite the high-minded tone, Gorman’s ultimate sentiment is no different from that of everyone from music executives to newspaper publishers: Old revolutions good, new revolutions bad.

More excellent responses at:

UPDATE: Clay Shirky (and Gorman by association) makes BoingBoing.
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Library Issues Personal

Suber and Library Journal

So I’m finally back and mostly recovered from my amazing trip to Vegas (much, much more on that over the week…I’m still trying to comprehend the meal we had at the Commander’s Palace that Betsy blogged about). Imagine my surprise when I return and find that Peter Suber had blogged about my Master’s Thesis, and that Library Journal had the announcement of my new job up.

Proof that the world keeps moving while we’re on vacation, I suppose.

More on the vacation, on the more recent library happenings (I understand that our good friend Gorman has been a bit in the news again…can’t wait to catch up on that) as the week goes on.

Categories
Digital Culture

Revenge of the Codex People

Really great parody of Gormangate: Revenge of the Codex People.

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Library Issues

Responding to comment…

…from the ever-insightful Eli over at Mad Librarian. She left a thoughtful comment on my post about Gormangate, and I wanted to get some thoughts out in response.

Eli in blockquotes:

Digitization can democratize information, it does allow for greater, broader and for the end user, cheaper access to information [my cynical side says that very little information is truly free and it’s more a question of how much gets subsidized, and whether the costs spread across a given community, but that’s what I get for hanging out with special librarians].

Of course, “free” here means something like “of such low individual cost as to be non-important” but your point is taken. I do believe, however, that digitization is a democratizing force in information interaction in much the same way that the printing press was a democratizing technology for information interaction. Potentially moreso.

I suppose my point (other than the one on top of my head) is that the devil is in the details when it comes to digitization, particularly in the current climate. There are many and great benefits to the process, but not all of them are automatic. Digitizing content doesn’t help people on the other side of the digital divide get to it, our current copyright climate encourages content owners to make material less available for the exercise of fair use rights (and first sale seems to be a dead issue entirely for digital material) and on the whole, it’s about as easy to lock down or “disappear” digital content as it is to do the same with “analog” works. And I have a one-word example for you: Elsevier.

I suppose that I am just enough of an optimist to see these hurdles as short term, given a wide view of the problem. The digital divide is there, of course, but is shrinking daily (and of course I believe that libraries have an enormous role in this…providing open computer access to patrons, playing the lead role in the cost spreading of the information in digital repositories, etc…). You have a pretty good idea how I stand on copyright issues, and any longtime reader of my blog should know (if not, I’ll refer you here or here). I cannot imagine a situation where, over the next 20-30 years and our generation begins to move into positions of power within the country, that the current copyright regime can hold. There will be a radical overthrow of the current legal understanding of copyright, and it will involve a re-definition of fair use with digital content at the core of the understanding of it, first sale rights will be reimagined…I left a comment on Justin‘s blog a while ago that underlined a bit of what I think is coming:

Add in the bit about “Content creators will rise up against the business interests of the RIAA/MPAA and demand that copyright law be brought into a more sensible form. The next generation of lawmakers will incorporate the Creative Commons licenses into US Copyright law, adding provisions for code as well as consumable media. This will spawn a remix culture that will sweep the globe, pushing the US out of the center of the entertainment industry and relocating it in China, India, and the former Soviet Union.”

I completely agree that Elsevier is the devil, though.

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Digital Culture Master's Paper Personal

Summary of attention

This is all in addition to the feedback I’ve gotten from the UK, Canada, and various schools here in the US. To make things REALLY interesting, Eli, of “Confessions of a Mad Librarian” above, gave a copy of the paper to Michael Gorman when he spoke at Stanford San Jose State yesterday. Needless to say, I’m interested to see what that brings.