Every digitized book, no matter how old or new, can become captive to an internet publishing enterprise – with Google a clear front-runner – potentially accumulating millions, perhaps billions, for an online aggregator while doling out pennies to those who one by one wrote this wealth of knowledge, permanently commodifying, commercializing, and monetizing the out-of-print backlist. With this kind of corporate potential at play how will anymore copyright-free ever see the digital light of day?
Lynn Chu, a writer’s rep, describes the 385 page “mind-numbing” Google setlement as “a vast cumpulsory licensing scheme ….setting in amber” Google’s internet “publisher monopoly power” exploiting America’s entire publishing output through a copyright-replacing Book Rights Registry, even managing publishers’ and authors’ capitulation as Google “data-entry slaves.” Strong words from a biased source in a WSJ.com opinion piece March 28.
A few years ago I heard an Associate University Librarian from the University of Michigan blandly express disinterest with what Google might do with the digitized copyies of that library’s treasure, freely given in exchange for a local digitized instance. Chu points out that “PDF scanning (how Google and everyone else digitizes books) [is] cheap and easy. Books will be digitized without Google” (see my comments from a year ago). Copyright-free? Dead as civic values. Is this the legacy some of America’s best libraries help leave in a drive to digitize on the cheap?
In his February 4, 2008 Boston Globe column Alex Beam quotes Louise Blalock, Hartford librarian who oversaw a $42 million renovation and expansion of that city’s public library, in turn quoting Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago: “If a city takes care of its schools, parks, and libraries, everything else will follow.” Ruminating a bit about the digital/print impact upon libraries, Beam notes the Pew study that says a young generation looks to libraries for answers, not just books, and Blalock’s observation that libraries are about connecting people with content, no matter the form. Bernie Margolis tells Beam about the hundreds who have looked at Haiti’s Code Henry since it went online and how it is important to have “a beautiful place” to come look at the original.
Boston is buidling a new branch library in Mattapan, designed by William Rawn Associates, doubled the size of the Hyde Park branch, designed by Schwartz/Silver Architects, and Hartford’s downtown library renovation was designed by FCHM-S; Fletcher, Harkness, Cohen, Moneyhun-Stopfel.
“A library is thought in cold storage.”
Samuel, Lord 1870–1963, British Liberal politician
[A Book of Quotations (1947)]
How to cite this entry: “Samuel, Lord” The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles.
Oxford University Press, 2002. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Boston University. 24 July
2006 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t93.e1580>
“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 1896–1940
[The Great Gatsby (1925) ch. 3]
How to cite this entry: “Fitzgerald, F. Scott” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations . Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford University Press, 2003. Oxford Reference Online . Oxford University Press. Boston University. 24 July 2006 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t91.e903>
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need”
Cicero
source: Anne H. Kenny, Interlibrary Loan Librarian, O’Neill Library, Boston College
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A national online library? If its Google’s, it isn’t even a comprise of corporate America anymore, is it? Can we say proprietary? This AP article, “Scanning world’s every book means turning many, many pages” includes the phrase “books to be included in Google Inc.’s Book Search, a portal …to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.” That doesn’t sound theoretical to me; it’s the marriage of capitalism – that “Inc.” and the hubris are inescapable – with the world’s published history and the more I reflect on it and ideas I heard at a talk a year ago, the more I think it’s a civic shame of monumental proportions.
It’s not Google’s’ fault and it’s not libraries’ fault; it’s a failure of national civic leadership and imagination on every level in preserving for SOCIETY and presenting to the world our very heritage said Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan of New York University on February 22, 2007 in a talk entitled Libraries and Copyright: Hands Off, That’s Mine! Who Owns What, and for How Long?, part of the Boston Athenaeum’s bicentennial lecture series. Civic values got the Boston Public Library built – and filled – and then mimicked throughout America, including a splendid Italianate version in Providence, Rhode Island where I spent many hours during high school. And so what if the BPL’s location served the upper class more ideally than the working classes scattered elsewhere in the city. It was something for all of us to aspire to collectively. Corporate America’s robber barons idealized and then built CIVIC America.
That’s what we really need now in the online world. Civic, not corporate monuments. And it could be done on the cheap, too. Google’s exercise thumbs its nose at the thoroughgoing impoverishment of American society: see what a billion or two could have accomplished if only WE – all of us together – had had the vision. Reminds me of a line I’ve seen in the trailer for Charlie Wilson’s War that could be said of American society: “And you ain’t no Thomas Jefferson, so let’s call it even.” It’s been a long slide into the corporate ether.
A short piece in Boston’s April 9-16, 2008 freebie weekly dig entitled “80 percent of success is just showing up” cited high school dropout rates in large cities. No surprise, not showing up is a strong predictor for dropping out. Students with with high test scores yet high absence graduate at lower rates than those with low absence and low test scores. The Boston Plan for Excellence factors attendance in its newly developed Composite Learning Index (CLI), creating a risk profile for each student based upon academic and behavioral measures.
Showing up for the boring counts, too. The article included complaints about how teaching to the required MCAS test in Massachusetts has made high school more boring then ever, but the Boston Private Industry Council’s director does not think enough is being done to convince kids that a high school diploma is worth 2 million dollars over a lifetime of income. Interest helps: “’strong teacher-student trust made a difference of five days more of attendance over the year’” [there was no information on how trust was measured], the implication being improved graduation prospects.
So, unless you’ve got the talent to write a best-selling novel and strike it big, the ploddingly simple task of showing up pays off in the long run. We’re back to the hare and tortoise sculptures featured in Copley Square nearby the end of this weekend’s Boston Marathon.
Leading requires showing up! In fact, it’s one of the secrets to leading: being there, volunteering, following through.
Ann Wolpert, MIT Director of Libraries, did just that as she gave the keynote at Simmons College GSLIS (Graduate School of Library and Information Science) Alumni Day at 9am on a cold March 30 Saturday morning! I think we had all struggled in – at least the older half of us – see below. Based upon the multi-school event’s theme Educate, Empower, Transform: Preparing Leaders for the 21st Century, Ann focused most on leadership. She did not have any one thing to say, but touched upon a number of topics. Not least was showing up.
As for the 21st century: that’s a done deal. Wolpert noted two out of three librarians are over forty-five years of age, which means there’s a generational handover looming in library-land. It was evident in the room – a mix of over 45 professionals like myself and ever younger graduate students; a noticeably different mix from my own mid-career-changing graduate school days. Fifteen years in the profession and I am already an old dog!
Here are my notes and observations- (more…)
Folks from the Biodiversity Heritage Library gave a presentation to Boston Library Consortium (BLC) members today about how they are using books and serials scanned from their collections into the Internet Archive (as charter participants in the Open Content Alliance) to create a scholarly portal (geek’s haven) for accessing their content in a variety of interesting ways. The natural science collections they are scanning, some of the oldest yet still currently used scientific literature, lends itself to searching by species and other like names. The most intriguing tool they have developed is to cross-index all the content of the books and journals they have scanned (and are continuing to scan) against the NameBank taxonomic classification system (currently at 10,775,553 records) created by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, whose library, the MBLHWHOI Library, is also a member of the BLC. As they explained it, names of plants, animals, insects, etc. in scientific literature very much depend upon history and precedence – where does this fit in with what has been observed and classified before? – which sounds to me a lot like the ISI principle of citation history – who cites whom – tracking the growth and development of a scholarly body of literature.
There’s no reason these same principles could not be applied to other scholarly schemes. Someone mentioned, for example, tracking every instance of the words “Tom Sawyer” in fiction not written by Samuel Clemens utilizing a human “namebank” would yield some fascinating results. A multi-type library academic consortium such as the BLC could provide fascinating “windows” into its scanned collection(s) this way. It also strikes me that there are a lot of institutional repository-like lessons to be learned here as well as a striking example of creating a sophisticated web interface using a dazzling variety (“purposeful emerging technology”) of off-the-shelf web tools / software / applications, etc.
Hit more for my detailed notes on today’s meeting-
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Algorithms are the secret recipe rendering unmanageable amounts of data useful to the naked eye. In fact, according to the Economist, a recipe is an algorithm! A recent article, pages 85-7 in the September 15 issue and dated September 13 online, entitled “Business by numbers,” provides an excellent overview for the lay reader of the various purposes to which algorithms are put: verifying credit card numbers (the Luhn algorithm); projecting shipping logistics at UPS; rerouting delivery trucks out on the road, internet traffic across the globe, and airplanes on the runway using real time optimisation; or detecting fraudulent shopping behavior.
Algorithms are also used to make sense of folks’ daily activities – yours and mine – and provides opportunity “to respond to each customer in a personalised way.” My grocer can compare my inordinate love of orange juice with those of other juice purchasers and soon get a pretty good idea of what else I might like to buy that I am not yet already buying – and pitch me with a coupon. Amazon now tries to get us to buy two books instead of just the one we were looking for. Search engines, like Google, where algorithms underpin every results screen sent us, analyze our every browse and click. The bigger the pile of data the more precisely can be the response – as long as the algorithm sorting works. The author describes the fine art of discrimination required in creating effective and useful algorithms. Just like recipes, they require testing. This is how “they” hope to get ever closer to answering differently and well for each one of us that all important question: “what should I do on my day off tomorrow?” (See previous post.)
Loyalty cards and logins help peel back the curtain shielding us from corporate prying eyes. So while tailored offerings might delight us, one should not forget the title of this article, either. It is commercial consideration ultimately driving business by the numbers.
At last year’s Off-Campus Library Services Conference in Savannah, Georgia I heard Marshall Keys’ attempt to disabuse us librarians in attendance about the privacy concerns of young library patrons in the online world of today. He entertained us with pictures of students with bongs, in heightened states of revelry, and the like – all easily garnered from the web. Many newspaper articles have since appeared about the imprudence of such displays when college graduates job-search the next year.
But this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We give away a little with every search and online post. Carefully collected revelations about ourselves could feed the consumerist machine which will then ceaselessly throw back tailored just-for-us pitches. And who wants to lead the charge? Google seems a likely candidate:
“As CEO Eric Schmidt explained last May, ‘We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.’ He said that Google wants to be able to answer when users ask, for example, ‘the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?””
So Google wants to know enough about us to answer the kind of question we might ask our partner as we finish dinner or ask a friend what direction our life should take after we’ve settled in over a drink. What’s the likelihood, though, if it’s sailing we enjoy, that community sailing will be the top search engine response as to what to do tomorrow, instead of the Sailing Boat Show with a stiff entry fee? Madison Avenue is climbing on board and Google is luring them in – that’s the gist of Jeffrey Chester’s online article Will Google’s Greed Ruin the Internet? Chester is head of the Center for Digital Democracy.
Those dreamy fluid notions from a few years back of an alternative, democratically driven, and pure online world just seem to be slipping through our mouseclicks. A number of the posts commenting on this article suggested (pleaded?): don’t click on the ads! Well, somebody is – just look at Google’s balance sheets. Librarians safeguard the curiosities of folks from the questions asked to the books checked out. Need we, when everyone is already letting it all hang out and Google wants to be able to skip the reference interview entirely?
Attended the Boston Regional Library System workshop entitled “Libraries Designed for Social Sustainability” yesterday and found it to be exciting. The presenters, from Adaptive Environments, Inc., a non-profit soon to become the Institute for Human Centered Design, promote universal design or design-for-all. These folks pioneered many ideas about accessible design since their inception in 1978 and contend that design based upon universal principles can be dynamic, exciting and attractive. Accessible design need not equal dull. Inherent in the ideas expressed I found a civic base – a goal to serve all well. Valerie Fletcher, Executive Director, explained that “variation in human ability is ordinary,” not exceptional. The aging of the world population alone makes a compelling case for incorporating these ideas. There will soon be more people over 60 years of age than under thirty – which has probably never happened in human history before. Advances in neuroscience provide further evidence for, identification of, and understanding about the variability in human abilities.
In addition to an overview of these ideas about designing the built, communications, and information environments to accommodate the widest range of physical and intellectual human abilities, Valerie and the AE librarian presented many good and bad examples of design in public spaces, many within libraries. Simple ideas applied in advance and carefully thought out can greatly improve the usefulness of facilities and services for all users. As Valerie said at one point, the need to apply “caution tape,” as on the steps entering the atrium of a library, or signage noting hazards and obstacles present clear evidence of poor design choices. The folks at Adaptive Environments, while happy to help see that design meets ADA compliance standards, consider this the floor above which all good universal design should rise.
Were I applying such ideas to this post I would add some visuals and provide a spoken alternative to these written words!
