Tag: library

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Library Issues Personal

A blogging we will go…

Suddenly and without warning, yours truly has become the blog expert at MTSU. It began slowly enough, with doing a workshop on academic uses of blogs and wikis at the MTSU IT Conference. Then we decided that actually having a blog for the conference would be a good thing, so that fell to me as well (never mind the fact that the campus had never even turned on PHP on the webserver). Once over that hurdle, and a few days of struggle to get MySQL happy with talking to PHP, the blog was born. Now I’m in the middle of putting together instruction pages, since this is a very, very new thing for everyone here. In addition, I was just asked to write up an article for the on-campus IT publication about blogs/blogging, so there’s another 300 words or so to pump out on the subject.

EDIT: also, I was just contacted today by the Library here at MTSU…seems they have 3 blogs that they are interested in moving off of blogger and onto our servers. Guess who’s gonna get to help with that?

On top of all that, I’m helping LITA with their blogging efforts, attempting to evaluate different blog software and figure out what they want to settle on as the official LITA blog.

Who knew that this would be a valuable job skill way back when we all started these damn things?

Categories
Legal Issues Library Issues

Even more Gormangate followup

And the Gormangate news continues. LISNews put up a summary of the blog coverage, and Library Journal published a reaction piece on the coverage of the story by bloggers, which Karen Schnieder proceeded to take apart with near surgical precision. I don’t really have much to add to her pitch perfect analysis, with the exception of this quote from LJ:

Gorman, whose views do not represent the official positions of either ALA or California State University Fresno (where he directs the library), has received more than 100 messages—more than half of them sent pseudonymously.

Karen does a great job analyzing the first part of this, but I’m a bit interested in the last bit. Why take the time to point out that some of the messages were sent anonymously? The only reason to do so that I can imagine is an attempt to lessen their impact. If the people can’t even put their name on a letter, why should we take them seriously, right? I can’t see any other reason for LJ to point this out, and that’s what bothers me most.

In this country (the US, for those keeping track) we have a longstanding tradition, upheld by the highest court in the land, of anonymous criticism. The courts have long held that for speech to be truly free, one aspect of that is the freedom to be anonymous in your speech. In the central case for this right, McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote:

Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.

In an even earlier case, Talley v California, Justice Hugo Black, noted:

Even the Federalist Papers, written in favor of the adoption of our Constitution, were published under fictitious names. It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.

In addition to the various poor journalistic practices pointed out by Karen, to be dismissive of anonymous criticism is to be ignorant of the history of speech in this country. I would expect better of Library Journal.

EDIT: The Shifted Librarian has a humorous look at possible new topics for Gorman to examine.

Categories
Legal Issues Library Issues

Help reform copyright law

The US Copyright office is looking for stories about Orphaned works (works where you wish to use them, but the copyright status is either impossible to determine or so complicated as to be enormously costly to determine). As the website Orphanworks.com describes it:

For designers, academics, artists, musicians, and filmmakers, using copyrighted works can be a huge headache. It can be impossible to find out if a particular work is still under copyright or not. And even when people would happily pay to use a copyrighted photo, passage, or video clip, it’s often impossible (or extremely costly) to find the copyright holder. When this happens, everybody loses. Artists can’t realize their creative vision, academics can’t clearly communicate their ideas, and copyright holders don’t get paid. Even worse, important pieces of our culture get needlessly locked away.

The Orphanworks.com site is being ran by the EFF, FreeCulture.org and Public Knowledge, and is basically a clearinghouse form that sends comments directly to the US Copyright office. This is an important request, and the more comments that are sent in the better chance we have of reforming copyright law into something resembling its original purpose:

The Congress shall have Power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

(United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8)

But hurry! The deadline for comments is March 25th!

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

More Fun with Michael Gorman

Well, we’ve already seen what Gorman (the President-Elect of the American Library Association) thinks of blogs and the blog people. Now we get his comments on Google and the Google Digitization Project in the latest issue of American Libraries.

*sigh*

To the quotes!

Since scholarly books are, with few exceptions, intended to be read cumulatively and not consulted for snippets of information, making those that are out of copyright available by means of a notoriously fallible search engine seems to be, at best, a misallocation of resources.

At best a misallocation of resource? It appears that Gorman believes that people are interested in the Google Dig project in order to find primary materials for research. While that might be ONE reason for something like the GDP, it certainly doesn’t strike me as the way it will popularly be used. I see the GDP being used as a quick and easy way to find quotes, to locate books when all you have is a quote (how many times have reference librarians had to spend hours figuring out where famous quote from scholar X came from?), to do intertextual comparisons that are simply not possible with print resources (I see massive digitization projects like GDP as potentially the biggest innovation in linguistic/pattern related text study ever), and yes, sometimes, to serve as a quick and easy method for those that are not near a library that has access to these works to read them.

And I really want to know what his justification for the “notoriously fallible” line is. That’s just incredibly sloppy writing, to make a judgement like that and not back it up. Then again, it appears that’s what Gorman is really good at, given his last couple of publications.

Any user of Google knows that it is pathetic as an information-retrieval system — utterly lacking in both recall and precision, the essential criteria for efficiency in such systems.

Utterly lacking? Utterly lacking?

At this point I just want to know what planet Gorman has been on for the last 5-7 years.

Google is by far the best search engine on the Internet, indexing and making searchable over, at the time of this posting, 8,058,044,651 web pages. That’s EIGHT BILLION pages. Mr. Gorman…I would love to see your suggestions for a better way to index 8 Billion pieces of disparate information.

Statements like that only show how out of touch Gorman is with the reality of information seekers.

Also, no amount of “research on search engines” is going to overcome the fundamental fact that free-text searching is inherently inferior to controlled-vocabulary systems….Google is supposed to have complex algorithms but still produces piles of rubbish for almost all searches.

And speaking of out of touch with information seekers…Mr. Gorman, there is a reason that our patrons want our OPACs to be “google easy” to use. It’s because Google, as far as the only audience that matters (the patron) gets them the information they need without the need for them to become experts in a controlled vocabulary. Would it be great if everyone memorized LoC subject headings and used them to search for what they need? Possibly. But that will never happen, and in the meantime while we’re waiting on that, full-text searches are the way people find information.

I can only guess again that Gorman actually means something like “Google produces piles of rubbish for specific kinds of searches that I can’t bother to deliniate right now” because it is a demonstrable fact that Google does provide good results. Want to know what demonstrates that? The fact that everyone uses it. The fact that it’s a freaking verb at this point in time. Heck, I can produce excellent results for Google searches, and I don’t try very hard. I have not yet had Google let me down when I need a factual answer to some question (and contrary to Mr. Gorman’s unspoken assumptions, that is what most people are after…random facts).

I can’t describe how disappointed I am in the President-Elect of the ALA. He’s not only come across as petulant and out of touch in his writings, but has repeatedly denegrated technologies that are useful and, in Google’s case, necessary for information seeking at this point in history. For someone who is supposed to be leading the ALA, it appears that his leadership might be in directions that most newer librarians aren’t very happy with. We already have to swim against the current of the established order of things in Library Land. Gorman is simply adding fuel to the fire of the next generation of librarians to come along and revolutionize our understanding of information seeking and gathering.

EDIT: A bit of conversation going on re: this topic over at lisnews.com.

Categories
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.

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

Michael Gorman vs Blogosphere

Well, the ALA President_Elect has certainly stuck his foot in an orifice with his recent comments on blogs and bloggers in Library Journal. He’s getting feedback from all over the ‘net, including Instapundit and Slashdot, arguable the two most read blogs in the world. LISNews has covered it, of course, and it’s all the rage on the various library listservs that I’m subscribed to. Other places of note: Jessamyn, Karen Schneider, and FrazzledDad. EDIT: More great stuff from Jessamyn. FURTHER EDIT: Here’s Metafilter’s take on it, with comments from all over.

Gorman’s response is that it was supposed to be satirical. Here are just a couple of noteworthy quotes from his “satirical” writing:

Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People…I had heard of the activities of the latter and of the absurd idea of giving them press credentials (though, since the credentials were issued for political conventions, they were just absurd icing on absurd cakes). I was not truly aware of them until shortly after I published an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times (“Google and God’s Mind,” December 17, 2004).

Yeah…press credentials. Absurd idea. Bloggers have had no real impact on news stories this year or anything. Much less bloggers covering political conventions. And don’t get me started about his comments on Google from the article that is mentioned above. He’s as profoundly mistaken about that as he is about blogging. I hope that he’s aware that Google and OCLC are working together, and that Google can point people to libraries in order to find the book they need.

It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.

I’ll admit that his use of “Blog People” instead of the correct term, “blogger” might be support for his claim of satire. It just comes across sounding condescending. And I’ll be proud to count myself in the numbers of those that “have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.” Many, many people have shown that digitization changes everything about access to information. It democratizes information, it allows for nearly costless access to information that previously would be impossible to use, it allows for transformative uses that no one ever considered before…I’m again just befuddled at his lack of understanding of the power of this stuff. It comes across like the people who, upon the invention of the telephone, couldn’t begin to understand why people would ever use one (originally it was thought that telephones would be used for educational and entertainment..piping in lessons or music to the home).

Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.

Clearly Mr. Gorman is not particularly familiar with Sturgeon’s Law, because if he was he would know that given the quality of writing of ANYTHING, 90% of it is terrible. As well, Jessamyn points out that this seems to imply that we’re all running to random places and soaking it all in as the One Truth. Yes, lots of blogs are terrible. But if you actually use some information literacy skills and seperate the wheat from the chafe, you end up with the ability to stay current on much, much more than was ever before possible. RSS and aggregators are intrinsically changing the way that information is presented, filtered, and absorbed. Failure to realize this fact will leave someone like Mr. Gorman happily fiddling while Rome burns around him.

Finally, my favorite comment from the Slashdot conversation on this debacle:

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.

If the President of the ALA has such a low opinion of bloggers, perhaps his organization should stop giving so many major awards to them.

I think what he actually meant to say was something along the lines of:

“A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable — except for ALA literary award winners such as Orson Scott Card [ornery.org] or Neil Gaiman [neilgaiman.com] or Sherwood Smith [livejournal.com] or David Brin [blogspot.com] or Jane Yolen [janeyolen.com] or Dianne Duane [blogspot.com] or, oh, bugger, you know, all those other ALA award-winning authors who also blog, not that I want to imply that ALA award-winning librarians who blog, like Kathleen de la Peña McCook [blogspot.com], are bad either, and oh, yeah, I definitely don’t want to seem to be criticizing PLABlog [plablog.org], the brand new blog of the Public Library Association [pla.org], especially not when we put out a nifty little press release [ala.org] crowing about it, just last month, because that would look pretty stupid, now, wouldn’t it — er, um, what was I saying, again?”

EVEN FURTHER EDIT: So people are now digging up different quotes that Gorman has made in different publications about blogging/bloggers. Here’s one found by Rachel Singer Gordon on the NEXTGEN list:

“Unfortunately, if there are writers of genius, or talent, or even basic competence out there blogging, I have yet to find them. In the early heady days of the Internet, we were promised that, in the future, everyone could be published. Alas, that promise is being fulfilled, which should remind us all to be wary of what we wish for” (Our Own Selves: More Meditations for Librarians. Chicago: ALA, 2005:208).

And this guy is an example of a librarian that the rest of the world is going to use to judge our profession. *sigh*

Categories
Library Issues Master's Paper

And still the Perils comments roll in…

Had a good conversation via email over the last few days with Walt Crawford, who discusses Perils briefly in his latest issue of Cites and Insights. While he had emailed me to warn me that it wasn’t all positive, I think that the points he makes are very valid (I’m becoming more aware of issues with Perils by the day). That said, I appreciate the complimentary nature of many of his comments.

And still, the spread and attention continues to amaze me. In the beginning of his comments, Walt says “Griffey publicized his paper widely.” I’m not sure how wide posting it to a blog and emailing it to one of the authors that I cited reasonably extensively (Cory Doctorow) is. From there to BoingBoing, and from there it snowballed enormously. I can’t say I’m not pleased, but I am still surprised.

Categories
Digital Culture Legal Issues Master's Paper

Copyright and Willy Wonka…

Just watching one of my favorite movies of all time, Willy Wonka and Chocolate Factory. I’ve looked over the ‘net for a list of the literary references that Wonka uses during the film, and not found any complete lists. I’m a bit curious as to whether they only used public domain quotes, or whether they had to jump through the hoops that a modern producer would need to in order to clear the copyright on so many quotes. Many of them (Shakespeare is used a few times) are clearly public domain, but others are not so clear (O’Shaugnessy and others). Anyone know of such a resource? I’ll put on my reference librarian hat and find one if no one knows of one.

Just another great example where borrowing works from others made the movie more interesting, and raised it above the norm. Hopefully the remake won’t have to drop the sort of playful quotations for fear of lawsuits.

Categories
Library Issues

From College & Research Libraries News…

Edit: The text of the article in question is actually online: Open Access.

Comes an interesting article by Rick Anderson titled Open Access in the Real World. I don’t think that several of his points are on target, though.

First point:
“While choices made by authors, publishers, and librarians do have an effect on the information marketplace, their choices and actions have little or no effect on the deeper economic reality in which that marketplace exists. That reality is determined in fundamental ways by two simple facts over which the human players in the information economy have little control, and a productive and intelligent conversation must proceed from a recognition of these facts.”

Those facts are: “There is no such thing as free information” and “Information is not a public good.”

To say that authors, publishers, and librarians have little or no effect on the economic reality of the publication marketplace is a bit misleading. It strikes me that much the same thought must have crossed the members of the recording industry bigwigs when the digital music revolution began. In that case, it was even further down the information pipeline..it was the consumer that was creating the change.

While he does point out an often ignored point in his discussion of “free information,” again, I think we’ve missed something. Of course there are costs associated with the creation of information. There are also benefits of said creation. His discussion of the trade-offs of this binary ignores the ability for information to do dual duty. It isn’t impossible for information to both create a return (economic or no) to the author, and also to be available for free to the public.

As well, the costs for archival and such can be spread to such a degree that it is almost literally no cost, and systems to do such are getting better and better every day. Things like the Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe system from Stanford and the Freenet project provide systems where archival of information is nearly invisible, and the cost is incredibly small. The cost for a system that is capable of running the Lockss system would be less than $250 right now.

Categories
Digital Culture Legal Issues Library Issues Master's Paper Personal

To everyone still coming by for Perils

Thanks for the attention, and I hope you enjoy the Perils of Strong Copyright. I’m somewhere over 1500 hits since this time last week, so I thought maybe people felt funny about jumping in in the middle of the original posts below.

If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it. I thought it would be easier for people just reading it to leave comments here, rather than getting buried in last weeks dialogue. So feel free to let me know what you think….good or bad. Both will help when I try to work this into an article for publication in some (open access) journal.