I’ve been doing a lot less public speaking this year, by choice. Just trying to travel less, be more of a homebody, be choosier. I just noticed that I haven’t mentioned any of the talks I have been doing or will be doing, so this is the post that clears that up. I have done three talks this year, all thematically related. You may be able to detect the theme….
Basically they summarize what’s been going on in the world of Fair Use the past year (a lot!) and then talk about what libraries are doing and what they can do. I also talk a bit about my work for Open Library where I am volunteering doing email support, helping people freely download and read ebooks through the Internet Archive‘s somewhat quirky interface. It’s challenging and fun. The two are related but maybe not in the way you’d think. People who are curious about Open Library or maybe helping out a little, please drop me an email and I can talk more about it at length.
A few upcoming talks, most on the far horizon. In August I’ll be in Lincoln Nebraska talking to rural librarians about technology use and training. In April of next year I’ll be at both TXLA (my favorite state conference I think, though there are many close seconds) and then at the Michigan Rural Libraries Conference on Mackinac Island. If you’re going to any of these, please let me know.
I listen a lot to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast about comedy. He interviews pretty much everyone you’ve ever heard of in the comedy world (and some people you may not have heard of) and one of the things he always asks people are “Who are your guys?” like who did you come up with in the comedy world and who did you identify with or look up to when you got started? I recently got an email from a library school student who is an anarchist librarian wondering a similar thing basically who my guys were and what resources were out there for radical librarians. The people who were my guys when I got started are all doing different things right now, interesting things. I wanted to share an amended version of the resource list and email I sent her. These are just people in the radical librarian niche, there are a lot of other people who have influenced me in many other ways. Who are your guys?
Sandy Berman was one of my original guys. I was lucky enough to get to know him when I was a library student and was active in my local SRRT chapter. http://www.sanfordberman.org/zine/zine1.htm
I think the work that Radical Reference is doing is important. It’s sort of distributed often crisis or demonstration-based reference services and they also do some email and other support.
It’s a neat project and the takeaway for me is the idea of “just in time” reference or event-based reference especially at large events like marches and demonstrations but this could be anything really.
There used to be a much more active anarchist librarian community on a mailing list and forum
I’m not sure where that bunch of people gets together, but Chuck Munson who runs that site is worthwhile to talk to.
The big takeaway is that there are a LOT of people doing this sort of work, the profession attracts folks like us.
Rory Litwin and the Library Juice Press put out a lot of worthwhile information about the more radical aspects of the profession as well as professional development opportunities.
The FreeGovInfo people spend a lot of time making sure that government information is available to ALL the people. It’s interesting since, well, it’s very involved with government, but making the current government we have accountable and responsible is a worthwhile goal
are both groups that take a fairly radical approach to what is a library issue and work within big organizations like the ALA to be on the record about things that matter. There’s some pushback to this, but overall I think they are worthwhile. Not everyone is an anarchist, there are varieties of left-wing thinkers (and some libertarians? I don’t know) but worthwhile to get to know and worth seeing if there are people in your area.
More recently the Occupy Libraries put an organized face on the idea of a protest library. Many places to read more, here is a current blog and wiki about the Occupy Wall Street library.
There are also mutual aid type societies of groups of librarians working towards a common cause without the more formalized structure of a state or national organization.
Some individual librarians are people I met early on and are still continuing to do great stuff. I’m also most hesitant to mention anyone for fear I’ll leave someone out, but here are two folks
Julie Herrada, curator of the Labadie collection http://www.lib.umich.edu/users/jherrada Lincoln Cushing, archival consultant, All Of Us Or None collection (among other things) http://www.docspopuli.org/Personal.html
But at some level I think the best way to start mutual aid projects from within the library context (in my personal opinion) is to try to work FOR
– fewer limitations on content (against DRM even if you may not be able to eradicate it)
– fewer copyright restrictions and be careful about self-censoring
– access to library materials to more people including historically disadvantaged groups such as language minorities, people in prison/jail, homeless people, people with disabilities
– sharing the community resources that you hold in the widest way possible
And while I think it’s important to be upbeat, it’s also important to understand what the threats are in the community and trying to work AGAINST
– more restrictions on copyright and/or internet freedom
– people meddling in childrens’ rights to read or intellectual freedom generally
– internet filtering
– publisher’s harassment of librarians and others for telling the truth about their practices or business models
– increasing push towards rental/lease of content and away from purchasing it and the rights that first sale gives us
I regularly trot out Open Library as an example of both a project that is nice and library like while also being attractive and usable and, at the same time, pushing the envelope of “how to be a library” in ways that are dignifying to both patrons and librarians alike. I was delighted to read this article about the results of a recent meeting where ALL state librarians voted unanimously to form an alliance with the Internt Archive’s Open Library project.
[Oregon state librarian] Scheppke said this allows libraries the chance to envision digitizing everything in their collection, from books about local history to works by local authors.
“If that doesn’t happen who knows when those books will become ebooks, maybe never,†Scheppke said. “That’s what really appeals to the state libarians; it’s a solution we haven’t had up until now to have a much more complete ebook collection,†he said.
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 ï¬les We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these ï¬les 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 ï¬le is essential for informing people about this project and helping them ï¬nd 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 speciï¬c use of any speciï¬c 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.
