Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Here's another great one from free_govt_info: "Expect more from ExpectMore.gov". ExpectMore.gov provides performance reports on man government programs. If you want to be depressed, check out the list of programs marked as "ineffective", which includes programs such as Amtrak:



If it's not obvious, I vote for #1.

Anyway, the search engine is non-existent, but the transparency (we have a moderately effective "Geothermal Technology" program? An adequate "CDC: Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Tuberculosis" program? Only four DoE programs ranked "effective"? Who knew?) is truly awesome.

If you're not reading free_govt_info, consider it. A few days ago they linked to The American Presidency Project's database of all presdential signing statements. Did you know that George Bush, Sr. felt that "To provide for the minting of commemorativecoins to support the 1996 Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games and theprograms of the United States Olympic Committee, to reauthorize andreform the United States Mint, and for other purposes" impinged on his constitutional authority?

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In other linkage, from openaccess_rss, a hilarious and apt analogy to the current academic publishing model:



It goes on, getting more painful with every line.

And in incredibly depressing news, judges have been citing Wikipedia in verdicts. Copiously.

Yesterday I went to an extremely valuable BLC community of interest institutional repository meeting. The reason it was valuable was because most of the people attending were in about the same place we are -- barely started, no software yet chosen or a recently installed software package with a few articles in it. Many of the bloggers, speakers, and presenters on this topic have more established programs, with software, and a program, and administrative support, and invested faculty. Speaking with other librarians who, like us, are barely started in the process of setting up an institutional repository highlighted some valuable questions and concerns.

One which really came to light for me is a problem which is probably so resolved for the established repositories that people don't even consider it a question: should the institutional repository hold what we find valuable or what the faculty find valuable? Specifically, should we be driving toward open access articles, which the faculty aren't demanding, or should we be serving the faculty's actual demands, which for most of us seems to be file management of vast piles of working data (images or datasets, usually).

My argument is that we should be serving both of these needs, and it is deceptive to think of them as both "institutional repository". One need is driven by our faculty, and should be thought of as a business process requirement. Their business process requires them to be able to manage terabytes of data. Some libraries might be taking on the responsibility for helping them do this management (in terms of backups, metadata application, etc.). If, in a given university, managing this data is the library's responsibility, than as employees of the University we should of course be fulfilling our requirement.

But this is entirely separate from the open access archives of faculty research. One comment that multiple people made in yesterday's meeting is "but why should we be giving them open access archives, when they don't want them?" And my argument would be that in this particular place we're not responding to a faculty request -- and that's okay. We're being visionaries in our field. We're serving the greater scholarly community, which happens to include our faculty, even if they don't know it yet. We are getting ahead of the game, so when requirements about open deposit of research start coming down from grant funders, we'll be able to provide them with the repository.

Saying "but the faculty don't want Thing B, a one Thing A," is a false dichotomy. We provide them with Thing A, if that's part of our mission, but we also provide them with Thing B. Just because they aren't asking for it doesn't mean it's not our responsibility to give it to them. They don't have to use it -- though many of them, once they learn about increased impact factors, eventually will. But we should still give it to them.

Because open access archives aren't just for our own faculty. They benefit scholarship and education and research in the world, and that doesn't just help our own universities.

Certainly doesn't hurt, though.

The kerfluffle about Google books, which has resurfaced since the surprising University of California decision to contract with Google as well as with the Open Content Alliance, seems to be missing the point. So much of the crosstalk I have seen seems to be about the same old questions of publishers rights, open access, serving users, and the like. But the very fact that the University of California is contracting with both Google and the Open Content Alliance ought to be raising very serious questions about long-term licensing agreements and giving away our publicly accessible holdings to for-profit companies.

At a recent Boston library consortium meeting somebody came up with a great phrase which a really wish I could remember, but essentially it was how in the past we've been much too prone to giving away our rights in return for having somebody else do the work. And the important thing to remember as librarians is that it's not our rights were giving away, it's the public's rights to view the information.

In the most recent Chronicle article about the University of California and the Google project, they explore some of the contract negotiations which have been made public.

Both the university and Google will get digital copies of the scanned works, but there are some restrictions on how the university can use its copies. The university can offer the digital copy, whole or in parts, "as part of services offered to the university library patrons." But the university must prevent users from downloading portions of the digital copies and stop automated scanning of the copies by, for example, other search engines.

Entire works not covered under copyright can be distributed to scholars and students for research purposes, but there are limitations on in-copyright material.

What I'm hung up on here is "entire works not covered under copyright can be distributed to scholars and students for research purposes". If the materials aren't covered under copyright, why is there a limitation on the situations under which the entire work can be distributed? These are public domain materials, correct? (And it's not clear to me whether or not the University of California has the right under their contract to offer the same books to the Open Content Alliance, or if by having Google scan them, they have locked up that digitized book in Google for ever.)

Once upon a time, it seemed perfectly reasonable to be giving away rights like this because if the private companies didn't do the scanning, the materials would never be made available at all. But the University of California is already involved in projects with the Open Content Alliance. Every day they're proving the point to a non-profit organizations committed to openness can also do this work. The University of California defends its decision to work with Google as well on the grounds that the Open Content Alliance Scans as many books in a month as Google scans in a day, to which I can only respond "is there a gun to your head? Is the need to scan 3000 books a day so urgent?"

As a disclaimer, I don't know the answer to that question I just asked. Maybe their need is that urgent, maybe their contract with Google, which has not as far as I know been fully disclosed, is airtight in favor of the university and the public interest. But I do think this arrangement should be prompting people to ask more of these questions. Once you enter into a licensing agreement for something like this are often stuck, and I think I might be time to take a step back and think about pace, and rights, and why we are doing this. It may be that what the University of California is doing is exactly right, but it is still prompting us, in my always so humble opinion, to be asking these questions.

As I approach the end of library school, I am overwhelmed with the projects I don't have time to even investigate.

• Boatloads of open-source cataloguing projects
  
• Metadata initiatives out the wazoo
  
• Open Access initiatives
  

All important, exciting, an extremely interesting to me. Not to mention that I don't have time to look into all the personal projects that led to work on: bar-code scanning and cataloging my own book collection; writing the database to catalog our music collection so we can easily write tools to generate playlists and archive mixes we've made (even if we still only own analog copies of the songs); creating a comprehensive database of reference sources with annotations which can be used to generate bookmark files or pathfinders.

With luck, having this space to talk about these issues will help me find focus.