access

Copyright, licensing, the government and you

Walt Crawford has a long piece in the latest Cites & Insights about the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license, responding to some online arguments against them by the Free Content community (Walt’s capitalization creates a useful distinction) including Wikipedia. My approach to the NC designation which I also use on this site, is philosophically much the same as Walt’s. If you’re using my content as a primary method of making money for yourself, please cut me in on it. If you’re not, then go ahead and use what you’d like. Letting me know is always appreciated.

This specific designation on this blog has come into play three times that I can recall.

The New York Times magazine reprinted a text version of my Five Technically Legal Signs for Your Library, only they changed five to three and changed some of the wording and credited the material incorrectly. I wrote them a pointed email outlining this and highlighting the site license, and they allowed me a heavily edited response in the letters section of the next issue.
When a Wikipedia editor wrote an article about me, I was asked if I would offer my “The FBI Has Not Been Here” sign as an illustration. This seemed to be preferable to some dorky picture of me, so I agreed. They needed me to remove the license from that image in order to have it be available on Wikipedia which is a Free Content site — meaning that you can use any image in Wikipedia for any puspose at all. Remember the people who own the content and dictate the terms of the license can negotiate other deals for their own content, the license is just a shortcut for people who want to know “what can I do with this content without even asking?”
When TechSoup asked to reprint an article of mine on safety and security issues for public access PCs that had originally appeared on WebJunction, they asked if I wouldn’t mind putting a CC license on the content so that it could be reprinted by other nonprofits which seemed fine to me. We had a little back and forth about how much editing the reprinted article would go through. The fact that I had licensed the content made it a little easier to have the content presented the way I wanted it to be presented and I’m happy with the result.

This luxury assumes of course that you own the content to begin with, and that you know you own it. As we move into the shiny world of user-created content in the form of blogs, podcasts, collaborative online projects and ephemeral notations (do you own the comments you put on someone else’s blog?) this will get more complicated before it gets simpler. For another copright consideration to sink your teeth into, K. Matthew Danes has put together a long easy-to-read piece on what copying means in a library context including a deep look at Section 108 which governs copying by libraries. Read and learn.

Flickr/Yahoo & Library collaboration

Posted on 30Jan0630Jan06 by jessamyn

Coming on the heels of the recent news about Google’s foray into international government entanglement, here’s some encouraging news perhaps. Flickr is working with the National Library of Australia to “build a image bank with over a million images to be managed by the National Library of Australia.” This seems to not be an archival process but a way for the library to use what Flickr does best, upload, store and allow tagging and categorization of lots of digial images, combined with the mission and purpose of the library. I’m not sure how the library is managing these photos, but it will be fun to see contemporary photos in the PictureAustralia database. I saw a demo of this project when I was in Australia last year, it’s a pretty great resource. [thanks mom]

when is a search engine not a search engine?

Posted on 27Jan0627Jan06 by jessamyn

Is it okay to remove sites from search results in response to lawsuits? Check out this search and make sure you read the disclaimer at the bottom. Then read about Google agreeing to censor their results in China, begging the question “Are censored results better than none at all?” Gmail and Blogger will also not be available to Chinese users of Google. As a quickie example, you can see the results for Tiananmen Square searches: US Google, Chinese Google, Chinese Google search using Chinese characters. The Chinese searches have the disclaimer “æ®å½“åœ°æ³•å¾‹æ³•è§„å’Œæ”¿ç–ï¼Œéƒ¨åˆ†æœç´¢ç»“æžœæœªäºˆæ˜¾ç¤º” or “In accordance with local laws, regulations and policies, part of these search results are not displayed.” This is all in addition to other blocking strategies, commonly referred to as The Great Firewall of China. However in this case Google.cn doesn’t just block searches for keywords, it blocks selectively sometimes without saying that it’s doing so. Slightly more explanation and intrigue over at Search Engine Watch, Google Blogoscoped and Google’s own official blog.

Why does this matter to librarians? Well, it’s obvious how it matters to librarians in China. It also calls into question the very idea of objectivity in search engines everywhere. As Google spends more time and effort currying favor with librarians trying to show how sympatico they are, this move is a departure from expanding access. People who search Google.cn for topics like Tibet or Falun Gong (or possible even other less innocuous topics) won’t just find an absence of results, they’ll find results that are skewed towards the Chinese government’s policies about those topics. That’s wrong. Pundits argue that this is a sensible move for Google from a business perspective, and I won’t debate that, but it does serve to starkly highlight the differences in saying “free acces to information” if you’re a for-profit shareholder-owned company. Any librarian who has had to grapple with a filter with an unknown blacklist will be familiar with the struggles that people on the non-filtered side of Google are going through trying to figure out just what is happening. [metafilter]

NCSU Libraries new “pig butchering” OPAC

Posted on 15Jan0615Jan06 by jessamyn

We talk a lot about what library catalogs could look like, but who is building them? Well, Andrew Pace and NCSU for one. Here is the press release announcing their new Endeca-powered OPAC. Why is it different? It focuses on relevance instead of some arbitrary criteria — our OPAC at one of my old jobs would list DVDs by add date, so all the ones that showed up at the top a search list were labeled “IN PROCESS” and thus not available to patrons — and allows simple search narrowing. Andrew explains more. Don’t let me blather on about it, check it out yourself (and notice the slick URL while you’re at it). [web4lib]

Joe Janes and the iSchool podcast

Posted on 15Jan0615Jan06 by jessamyn

I sometimes have a hard time talking about technologies I don’t know much about. I can see things like cell phones in a professional context — library policy, kids IM on them, they’re good for updates — as well as in a personal context — I don’t have one, I can’t get service at my house, if I really wanted one, I would have one. I feel this way about podcasts as I’ve said before. I don’t listen much to radio shows, sometimes I feel like the only person of my political persuasion who isn’t an NPR junkie, so podcasting doesn’t appeal. On the other hand, the whole idea of personally created content appeals to me much the same way that zines do. How great is it to be able to produce your own radio show and immediately be able to distribute it internationally? Seems sort of great. With that in mind, I point you to InfoSpeak created by the tech-positive smarties at the University of Washington iSchool (yes I went there, no it wasn’t anything like this when I was there). It’s “student-produced serial media” which, yes, is a podcast, but if you don’t get the whole podcast blah blah blah, you can also just listen to it online, simple. First episode, one of my favorite talkers Joe Janes, iSchool prof and Google pundit talking about how Google is changing the way we work, among other things. Check out the links next to the description, that’s what I’d like to see from more podcasters. Happy inaugural podcast, iSchool! [thanks carolyn]