#access2009pei – Cory Doctorow – Copyright vs Universal Access
1 Oct 09
tale of two networks: the one we thought we would get, delivering 500 channels of high-res tv! The network that would make us more socially normally (instead of infinitely weirder). David Eisenberg calls this the “smart” network.
Instead, we got a dumb network, in which the people in the middle don’t know what they tech is for or what people would do with it. Great advantage to this is that people at the edge can be very smart.
Surprisingly, dumb network delivered progressively low resolution. Example of telephone, from high quality centrally controlled network, through introduction of crappy phones, to mobile, to skype. We trade quality for price, access, and customizability. Content isn’t king, conversation is.
Every exec thinks they’re industry is the most important thing ever, and are regularly proven wrong by the cycle of creative destruction that is the market economy. Except when the have a regulatory monopoly.
Countries have formerly managed copyright in local, idiosyncratic ways. However, the current regime is governed by a harmonized approach developed through WTO etc. and these rules are written primarily by industry insiders, preferring rights of producers over rights of users.
The network is fundamentally a copying machine, with increasing capacity for storage. It just gets easier to copy. But copying is reified not as an act of an individual, but as an act of a company making copies on an industrial scale. The problem is it doesn’t take a giant, industrial machine to make a copy any more, but we trigger the same set of regulations that govern industry to govern the activities of private individuals. On the internet, we make copies simply by accessing material. We communicate, make plans; read for education, political engagement; work, fall in love… all governed by copyright.
UK study: Extending the term of copyright has a net negative effect economically. DRM doesn’t work. Policies are set without any recourse to evidence. Industrial revolution was not based on buying and selling machines, but using and access to them. Info revolution must also be based on access and use.
The punishment for infringement in many places is disconnection from the internet. Effectively, this is equivalent to the death penalty for citizenship. Future treaties may build surveillance and control into regulations, requiring hardware to be checked at borders, ISPs to inspect packets. These negotiations are entirely in secret, the Obama admin says its position papers are state secrets. Why? Because experience has shown (Hello, Sam Bulte) that when the public becomes aware of them, we rebel.
Copyright law should go on doing what it’s always done: regulate the way corporate entities interact with one another, not how we as individuals act. The point of copyright law can’t be to ensure that one group of people get to make a living for ever. Rather, its role should be to ensure that the greatest number of people can participate in culture. Libraries have an important role, as an unimpeachable moral authority.
Posted by pzed on October 1, 2009 at 7.16am
institutional repository – some definitions
18 Sep 09
ODLIS:
A set of services offered by a university or group of universities to members of its community for the management and dissemination of scholarly materials in digital format created by the institution and its community members, such as e-prints, technical reports, theses and dissertations, data sets, and teaching materials. Stewardship of such materials entails their organization in a cumulative, openly accessible database and a commitment to long-term preservation when appropriate. Some IRs are also used as electronic presses to publish e-journals and e-books. An institutional repository is distinguished from a subject-based repository by its institutionally defined scope. IRs are part of a growing effort to reform scholarly communication and break the monopoly of journal publishers by reasserting institutional control over the results of scholarship. An IR may also serve as an indicator of the scope and extent of the university’s research activities. (institutional repository (IR))
Wikipedia:
An Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating — in digital form — the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.
For a university, this would include materials such as research journal articles, before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review, and digital versions of theses and dissertations, but it might also include other digital assets generated by normal academic life, such as administrative documents, course notes, or learning objects. (Institutional repository)
CARL:
An institutional repository (IR) is a digital collection of an institution’s intellectual output. IRs are a key infrastructure component in the digital environment because they provide better access to our digital assets and they ensure that digital objects are managed appropriately. (Canadian Institutional Repositories)
For the record. . . .
Posted by pzed on September 18, 2009 at 3.13pm
institutional repositories
16 Sep 09
I’ve been planning, for a few months now, to start using this space to think more deeply about my job. Among other things, I’m Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Windsor’s Leddy Library. What a job title like “Digital Initiative Librarian” might mean differs greatly from institution to institution; as in most things related to libraries, I think this is a by-product of the fact that we’re trying to figure out what it is we do anymore. I’m fortunate that I have a fair amount of leeway in deciding exactly what it is that our version of the Digital Initiatives Librarian will do.
But the position does come with some expectations, and one of these is to guide the development of our institutional repositories. The problem is, I’ve always been a little skeptical that libraries should dedicate resources to archiving copies of the published work of their faculty. Essentially, you end up with a large collection of disparate materials united only by the fact that at least one of their authors was affiliated with a specific institution. And nobody asks themselves, “Gee, I wonder what people at University X are doing in my discipline?” One of the reasons why academic journals exist is to collate research output by discipline, and if I want to stay on top of things in my field, I read those journals.
Not to say there aren’t useful things we can do under the rubric of institutional repositories. For institution, at Leddy we’ve been working on locally mounting digitized copies of UWindsor dissertations and theses. But generally, I don’t think creating additional copies of already published works and “exposing” their metadata is a particularly useful contribution to scholarship.
Now, it’s not like I haven’t read anything about this in the past, but I need to do a bit more focused reading over the next little while. And since I’m going to talk about it here, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to expose my prejudices first.
Posted by pzed on September 16, 2009 at 4.02pm
The Changing Meaning of ‘Unauthorized Access’
10 Jun 09
Cohen, Julie E. “The Changing Meaning of ‘Unauthorized Access’.” Distinguished Lecture in Law, Technology and the Arts. Case Western Reserve University, School of Law, Cleveland Ohio. 23 February 2009. Accessed 9 June 2009. <http://uc.princeton.edu/main/index.php/component/content/article/28-all-videos/4554-the-changing-meaning-of-unauthorized-access>
Legal system provides poor tools for resolving disputes over technical mediation of access to information: e.g. DMCA limits on tinkering with music/video formats and players; iPhone tinkering that can result in bricking. Unsatisfactory to give Apple final decision on whether tinkering activities are lawful. Categories are unsuited to technological convergence: iPhone is media player, software, and consumer equipment. Underlying conceptual frameworks do not address consumer’s freedom to tinker with an owned device
e-voting software is proprietary and copyright claims have been used to keep potential problems with e-voting secret. Government profiling: what algorithms get a name on the no-fly list? Where does the data come from?
Search engines and social networking: ability to identify users from search histories, Facebook problems involving new, mandatory features that consumers don’t want. Privacy issue with gmail using contents of email to generate ads–what then happens with the data? Algorithms and data use become trade secrets.
Legal tools don’t address the issues of accessibility to information and more importantly to the technical rules that govern and shape the networked environment. The legal framework operates to obscure technical rules.
Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999): Code is law. Intended metaphorically. Some take this literally, but of course states have no role. Others resist this idea, code is regulated by the market, therefore not law but “market ordering”. However, tools used to evaluate market ordering don’t square well with code, which can be developed to constrain market choice. Network emerges at conversion of public and private interest.
Others argue code is a form of regulation unique in human history: uniquely plastic ex ante and uniquely inflexible ex post, therefore new ideological problems. Based in a thoroughly discredited theory of technological determinism that fails to take into account aspects of social interaction and the evolution of code.
Too easy to understand law, code, market, as distinct Newtonian vectors, overlooking synergies among them and the fact they are strategies deployed by actors to serve self-interested goals.
Consider the larger context in which coded structures emerge. Legal frameworks to regulate access to systems are extended to impact ToS agreements and set parameters for marketplace behaviours. “Technical systems intended to police copyrights. . . represent one prong of a more diversified portfolio of strategies for controlling the shape of the digital media environment” (approx 20 min). Privacy, security, and technical systems for profiling increasingly linked to strategies for monitoring personal mobility and communications traffic. New systems of social ordering emerge where industry and government interests overlap.
How does code regulate? New structures establish prohibitions, but also new political economies around authorization of access to spaces, websites, information, resources, databases, transactional privileges. Governance of access to systems initially conceived of as protecting self-contained systems from malicious attack, not regulating market behaviours. If desire to use copyright to control access to digital files is legitimate, where digital files are widely distributed, controls must be as well, as must processes of authorization. “The figure of the hacker now coexists uneasily with the idea that the real locus of our distrust is the ordinary user” (24.30ish). Finally, privacy/security controls are inverted: authentication controls are all around us, and we become outsiders who need to identify ourselves to have access.
Freedom of speech/information is a central organizing philosophy in our culture, but much of the political economy of the networked information society is organized around secrets. Authorization and authentication become objects of desire, commodities, inducing us to reveal more and more of our personal data. Our trust in the market has allowed what are fundamentally governance decisions to be regulated by technical standards often developed in secrecy.
Everyday experience of the network: most users are not coders, bloggers, contributors to Wikipedia, etc. nor are they security experts or hackers. People generally interact with the network for mundane purposes, finding directions, ordering stuff, communication; to a lesser extent community building. When everyday user innovation comes into conflict with authorization regime, that’s at odds with how innovation historically occurs. More importantly, authorization regime seeks to instill a culture of permission-seeking in a predictable network environment in which independence of mind and action ceases to be valued. May also remake conditions of subjectivity and social identity.
Law and policy making must address these things comprehensively. Law should mitigate rather than reinforce structural problems arising from political economies of authorization. Best done through legislation, rather than waiting for courts to figure it out based on existing, inadequate frameworks. Regulations mandating greater transparency around closed systems, codes, data retention policies would help. However, transparency is retrospective, policy makers should recognize that users have interests to assert. May want to consider imposing obligations within standards processes.
Posted by pzed on June 10, 2009 at 11.41am
What’s wrong with Canada’s internet?
9 Jun 09
Michael Geist presents to the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications. Short answer: just about everything.
via Boing Boing
Posted by pzed on June 9, 2009 at 10.08am
The Absent User
27 Feb 09
Martell, Charles. “The Absent User: Physical Use of Academic Library Collections and Services Continues to Decline 1995–2006.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 34.5: 400-407.
Long story short: circulation counts, way down; reference transactions, way WAY down. Same here. Conclusions?
Clearly today’s users have substituted virtual use for in-person use. While they may be absent, they are not inactive. Networked electronic resources via library portals and the Internet have provided users with benefits that go far beyond anything available when physical use was the only alternative.
Librarians have coped successfully with the transition, as reported in several major user satisfaction surveys.* This is an extremely positive sign. It demonstrates that librarians have done that which was in their power to achieve. Keeping users tethered to the physical library was never a realistic option. Instead users engage in whatever strategy works best for them. This has resulted in fewer visits to the library and more use of networked resources for research, study, and teaching.
Trying to bring students back to the library in order to use the print collections may fail as a strategy if instructors do not require such use from their students or if online alternatives are available. Adding a café, art gallery, computer labs, classrooms, and other non-library services may increase gate counts but they are unlikely to influence circulation rates.
There is no end in sight to the declines in circulation and reference that many libraries are experiencing. This presents considerable difficulties for anyone who is attempting to justify a new building or an improved materials budget. In these situations it becomes necessary to demonstrate how monumental increases in the usage of electronic collections and services balanced with sound investments in the print collections will provide optimum benefits to students and faculty.
I wish this last point were better elaborated. Around here we’ve been talking about one justification for capital expenditures being in reconfiguring space precisely to meet changing patron behaviours and expanding service needs.
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* – Martell cites: Carol Tenopir, Use and Users of Electronic Library Resources: An Overview and Analysis of Recent Research Studies (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, Aug. 2003). 72 pp. Available: http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub120abst.html (Dec. 26, 2007); Amy Friedlander, Dimensions and Use of the Scholarly Information Environment: Introduction to a Data Set Assembled by the Digital Library Federation and Outsell, Inc. (Washington, D.C.: Digital Library Federation and Council on Library and Information Resources, November 2002): 1–20. Available: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub110/contents.html (Dec. 24, 2007); College Students’ Perceptions of Library and Information Resources 2005: A Report to the OCLC Membership. Available: http://www.oclc.org/reports/pdfs/studentperceptions_ part4.pdf (Dec. 26, 2007).
Posted by pzed on February 27, 2009 at 1.34pm
brain dump, or, what will we do with ourselves!?!
9 Feb 09
There’s an awful lot happening in my library, as in others. In my library it all seems to be happening at once. We’ve watched the tide of digital transformation coming in, and this looks like the year we need to learn to swim. We are dealing with budget cuts—realignments, as our Orwellian university administration insists on calling them—by attacking first our few remaining print serials. We’re seeing similar, though smaller, cuts to our print monographs budget. E-books are picking up, but haven’t yet replaced print as the preferred format for books. We do have to wonder if that won’t change in the near future.
At the same time, we’ve seen a collapse in our reference desk statistics. Use stats of titles in our reference collection have declined in an almost linear fashion. We’re looking at a revised policy document for reference that will, if passed, mean a formal recognition that the reference collection is primarily electronic.
Most of the librarians in my department base their work on a liaison model. We have subject specialties that derive from collections responsibilities, coupled with information literacy and specialized reference expectations. We work with faculty in our assigned departments, and we often say to students and faculty in those areas that we are “your librarian”. But we’re beginning to recognize that it doesn’t necessarily make sense for the liaison librarian to manage relatively insignificant print serials budgets or to spend time sitting on a reference desk that is almost always slow.
There’s the potential here to free up a lot of time. What are we going to do with ourselves? I do have a few ideas, and basically I’m just posting to get this bullet list out of my scribble book. What are some of the things we might be involved in?
- Information literacy
- Training (which is different) of staff, colleagues, perhaps faculty and students as well
- Collection and use analysis; the web generates tonnes of data
- public relations and marketing of library resources and services
- fundraising
- research, thinking, writing
That’s my first pass, I’m sure there’s more, and I’m sure these could be well articulated, but really this is a brain dump, so there it is.
Posted by pzed on February 9, 2009 at 11.25am
a disposition toward technological innovation
14 Jan 09
I’ve thought now and again about the idea of a post-modern library, in which we recognize that there may be multiple right answers to the same question, grey areas, various ways of doing things all of which rely on context for value and meaning.
In a rapidly changing technological environment, it is never enough to teach people to use these tools; the education process must enable students to adapt to new tools on an ongoing basis, and even to create their own tools. This certainly requires basic technological knowledge, but since much of what you can teach in a two-year master’s degree program will be out of date by the time a graduate has joined the workforce, the post important educational function is the inculcation of a disposition toward technological innovation and a critical sense of how technology can serve and advance an organization’s mission.
For all these changes, we must avoid the simple view of technological innovation and diffusion as one-directional. Technological shifts can operate in a refining manner, one that is not only revolutionary but that also returns us to the essentials of our craft. Librarianship is intellectual work, and the best practitioner’s role is never determined solely by the technology (though generations of workers might have acted otherwise). Consequently, though media and forms of information might shift, the professional’s role may thus be enhanced, especially where the shifts enable a new focus on the mission of the larger organization. Again, if our goal is to enable discovery, the emerging information infrastructure can place information professionals who fulfill this role at the center of activity. (55)
Dillon, Andrew. “Accelerating Learning and Discovery: Refining the Role of Academic Librarians.” No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century (PDF), 51-57.
Posted by pzed on January 14, 2009 at 12.20pm
the library will have two roles
13 Jan 09
Smith, Abby. “The Research Library in the 21st Century: Collecting, Preserving, and Making Accessible Resources for Scholarship.” No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century (PDF), 13-20.
In its local role, the library will be optimized to meet the needs of its campus community. The library is likely to provide repository infrastructure for stewardship of university-based information assets. Most of those assets will support pedagogy, administration, student life, alumni affairs, and other things vital to the school. A much smaller portion of them will support research. Research will be a far more global phenomenon than local institutions can support on their own.
In its networked role, the library will be able to support research and dissemination to the extent that it is tightly networked into the increasing cluster of inter-institutional collaborations that enable the creation and use of scholarly content. These collaborations will be key elements of research cyberinfrastructure, an infrastructure that will be a research-and-dissemination platform. In the magic phrase of the digital era, it “will scale,” be ubiquitous, and support a variety of scholarly domains, from astronomy to nanobiology, archaeology to urban design. The next-generation research library must be firmly embedded in that infrastructure, because that will be the platform to which scholars will gain access on their laptop library. (18-19)
Posted by pzed on January 13, 2009 at 8.22am
No Brief Candle
12 Jan 09
I’ve finally gotten around to looking at No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century (PDF). Published in August 2008 by the Council on Library and Information Resources, it’s not surprisingly a call for change in research libraries still shrugging off the shackles of having been founded in the 19th and reified in the 20th Centuries. Part I of the document is an overview of the discussions that were held at a CLIR organized conference in February last year, and this section ends with nine recommendations. I’m always leery of sweeping recommendations, they have a tendency to be overly simplistic and, if not wrong, pretty much self-evident (case in point from this document: Rec. 6, “Instruction and delivery mechanisms should be designed according to what we know of human learning and discovery.” — thanks for pointing that out).
But here are some interesting bits. I was hoping to cite only those that avoid the passive, but that just isn’t always possible.
1. “ . . . develop a rigorous research agenda. . . .” For me, the emphasis should be on “rigorous”.
2. “The research library should be redefined as a multi-institutional entity.” This is happening quickly in some areas, more slowly in others. We have an agreement in Ontario that effectively functions as a province-wide policy for print serials holdings for the 20 member libraries of OCUL, but we’re nowhere near consideration of the strategies itemized in this document, which if implemented here would effectively lead to a single provincial library.
3. “Greater collaboration among librarians, information technology specialists, and faculty on research project design and execution should be strongly supported.” I cite this recommendation with interest because what they’re talking about in the context of collaboration are the core elements of a new position I have recently taken on: scholarly publishing, institutional repository development, data curation, and digital resource development. The emphasis here is on faculty research.
Finally, 4. “More funds should be allocated for experimental projects and new approaches,” which dovetails nicely with 8. “Institutions should use studio and design experiences as the basis of a new library school curriculum.” I’d like to bend recommendation 8, though, and apply it to the notion of pursuing experimentation embedded in recommendation 4. Libraries are a built environment physically, virtually, and conceptually. The librarian-as-designer gets to experiment with and ultimately decide how to build (and renovate, and tear down, and rebuild). Exciting!
Incidentally, Part II of No Brief Candle consists of eight essays by conference participants.
Posted by pzed on January 12, 2009 at 2.11pm
