“the proposed policy is legally murky…”

There’s a quotation that I like that we bat around in activist circles a lot “Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” attributed to Margaret Mead. I like to apply this to some of my library struggles, saying that if I don’t point out things that I think are going wrong, who will? And that if I do make noise about things, maybe they will change. We’ve seen an example of this playing out over the past year with OCLCs new proposed policy and the pushback it received — starting small but gaining momentum — to the point where the general push of the old-new policy (OCLC retaining restrictive rights to records created by others) is off the table according to this post on LibraryThing. Good. Nice job team.

I have less of an opinion on OCLC entering the OPAC market because none of my libraries can afford them, still. I do believe that more sharing is a good thing, data monopolies are a bad thing, and murky policies that consolidate power anywhere other than “with the people” isn’t really solving a problem for libraries in general.

It’s time now for the library world to step back and consider what, if anything, they want to do about restricting library data in a fast-moving, digital world. Some, including some who’ve deplored OCLC’s process and the policy, want restrictions on how library data is distributed and used. Once monopoly and rapid, coerced adoption are off the table, that’s a debate worth having, and one with arguments on both sides.

Cornell removes restrictions on public domain repros

An ongoing debate in the copyright wars is whether an institution that is making reproductions of public domain materials available should be allowed to dictate terms (usually involving payment) for use of those items. We all know that libraries need money. It’s also true that having digital copies of rare materials available helps preserve the original items. So, if I want to download a public domain book from Google Books — say John Cotton Dana’s book A Library Primer — I get usage guidelines from Google attached to the pdf I’ve downloaded.

Usage guidelines
Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.

We also ask that you:
+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.
+ Refrain from automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.
+ Maintain attribution The Google “watermark” you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.
+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can’t offer guidance on whether any specific use of any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book’s appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe.

These are all “suggestions” as near as I can tell. As with the Chicken Coupon fiasco of a few days ago, the implied threat that comes along with this item puts a bit of a damper on the joy that is the public domain. Bleh. We’ve seen other big corporations and libraries doing this as well.

However, this post is mostly to say “Yay” about Cornell’s decision to remove all restrictions on the use of its public domain reproductions. Here’s their press release about it and here is the web page with the new policy. What’s their reasoning? Well among other thigns it’s hard to support a misson of open access and at the same time go out of your way to make materials more difficult to get ahold of and interact with. You can see some of Cornell’s 70,000 public domain items at the Internet Archive.

Free as in chicken, an experiment in terrible usability

So hey this is barely library related. I was reading library_mofo and saw someone complaining about Oprah. Yes Oprah the lady who seemed to have single-handedly revived reading in some circles. I didn’t understand the problem. Apparently somehow Oprah was telling people to go get a coupon for free chicken at KFC. This was a problem at libraries for some reason. I investigated further.

Turns out, you go Oprah’s site and then to this page and have one day (now only a few hours, maybe not even okay anymore depending when you read this) to print up to four coupons to get a free meal. Actually now that I go there I get message that “Our partner, Coupons, Inc. is experiencing an exceptionally high volume of traffic to the site right now. Please check back soon to get your coupon. Sorry for any inconvenience.” Color me surprised.

That brings me to my next point. This isn’t just a coupon on a page that you can print, this is a coupon system which involves downloading… something … to your computer (mercifully available for Mac/Win, don’t know about Linux, I assume not). Once you have downloaded and installed the something, you can then click the “Print coupon” link which will load the coupon on to a web page as a PDF and allow you to print it with a special barcode. Photocopied coupons are, for some reason, not acceptable at restaurants. I could not get it to easily work with Firefox but it was a breeze with Safari and I assume the Firefox issue was mine alone.

So, people without printers head to the public library to get a coupon for a free meal. You can use a printer at the public library, yay for the library! They can’t do this for any number of reasons up to and including

  • They can’t download the application to a library computer because of library policy
  • They can’t download the program to the computer because the website is being flakey
  • Coupons Inc is down
  • They manage to download the application and get to the “print coupon” link only to wait forever and have no idea if their coupon is printing or not
  • The “you are limited to four downloads of this coupon” restraint is somehow per computer which means the first four people are lucky, the rest not so much

Yes that’s right, it’s the coupon so popular and so buggy they had to create a FAQ for it. Do people look at this fiasco the way I do, as an well-meaning but ill-conceived program that uses a lot of stupid middleware to prevent fraud that mostly managed to tank itself due to overpopularity and complicated implementation? No, they think the library isn’t the place to go for printing. Or that librarians can’t solve technical problems as easy as printing a coupon from a website, so the next time they have a coupon to print, they’ll go elsewhere. Or that computers are hard.

This system encourages cheating. It complicates what should be a fairly straightforward computer activity for no particularly good reason. What do you suppose happens if you show up at KFC with a photocopied coupon? What happens when you print more than four coupons? Thanks for reminding me that “Coupon fraud is punishable by law.” If I ever get this website to load again, I’m printing 100 coupons and you can take me to jail. The nearest KFC to here is 21 miles anyhow. Boy am I glad I’m not working at the library today.

note: If you did download the coupon printing software, please make sure to uninstall it (read more).
second note: here are all 4789 comments on the Oprah site about this promotion.
final note: if you think I am overstating the case, check the twittermachine for the KFC+library keywords and weep.

talks I’ve done that might be helpful to you

So, my resolution to write all new talks for 2009 is meaning I spend a lot more time on them. “All new” may be a bit of a stretch since one of my recent talks contained a part of an earlier talk, but they’re all revamped and recontextualized. I was away for eight days. I did a training at the North Country Library System — a consortium that serves many tiny libraries just like mine, only in upstate New York instead of Vermont — that was a lot of fun. I then drove down to the Jersey Shore for one of my favorite library conferences, NJLA.

I don’t know exactly why NJLA is always so fun. I think it’s a combination of a well-organized and fun conference put on by an organization that doesn’t seem to be going broke and held in a neat location. The New Jersey librarians I have met there are a mix of older and younger librarians who seem to work and play well together. Maybe it’s just that they get my jokes. I did a talk about how to do some advanced stuff on YouTube and then also did an expansion of the Firefox talk that I did at Computers in Libraries.

As always my slides, notes and links are online and you can see them on these two pages.

Enjoy and if you came to any of these talks, thanks for being such a great audience.

in case you needed another reason to raise an eyebrow at Elsevier

I sometimes get a case of schadenfreude reading about bad things that happen to big companies that have a hand in library businesses. This latest mess involves Elsevier publishing what can charitably called a “sponsored journal” and what can uncharitably be called a fake scam journal, sponsored by Merck and internded solely to be cited in support of their drug Fosamax. If anyone has ongoing dealings with Elsevier and would like to get across to them how uncool this is, I’d appreciate it. Original article published at TheScientist.com available here with free registration. [nowthis]

Elsevier acknowledged that Merck had sponsored the publication, but did not disclose the amount the drug company paid. In a statement emailed to The Scientist, Elsevier said that the company “does not today consider a compilation of reprinted articles a ‘Journal’.”

“Elsevier acknowledges the concern that the journals in question didn’t have the appropriate disclosures,” the statement continued. “It is worth noting that project in question was produced 6 years ago and disclosure protocols have evolved since 2003. Elsevier’s current disclosure policies meet the rigor and requirements of the current publishing environment.”

The Elsevier spokesperson said the company wasn’t aware of how many copies of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine were produced or how the publication was distributed in Australia, but noted that “the common practice for sponsored journals is that doctors receive them complimentary.” The spokesperson added that Elsevier had no plans to look further into the matter.