Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

My built-in china cabinet has long since ceased to be a cupboard to showcase hand-me-down wineglasses and become a closet for hats. Now I've outgrown that space, and my coat closet, too, has become overridden with hatboxes. Veils and feathers, fascinators and caps, boaters and fedoras.

What I'm saying is that I have a lot of hats.

I have almost as many metaphorical hats, though sadly they lack the trimmings of the physical kind. Usually I juggle my professional interests adequately, although every fall I come to terms anew with the reality that, for three months, my contributions to Dreamwidth are what I give up to make room for teaching. This year is slightly tighter than usual, because of membership on the Odyssey Award committee, but at least much of the time spent listening to audio books is time that would otherwise be dead space.

In any case, here is a description of the 48 hour period of which I'm currently in the center.

• Yesterday morning, go to work as a digital archivist, where I've been having more opportunities to code of late as I've been contributing fixes and features to a blacklight/Hydra digital library portal we will be launching Any Day Now, and where I've been helping to manage our Open Access Week activities.
• Leave after a short day to teach two sections of the children's and young adult SFF class I teach with Amy.
• Get home at nearly 11 PM, go to bed, and wake up at 4:30 AM (on a gorgeous, starry autumn morning, Orion and Jupiter high in the sky) to catch the early train to New Haven for code4lib New England, where I'll be presenting on
  • accessibility,
  • debuting our FLOSS web-based archival collection management tool, and
  • will sit on a panel on digital preservation.
• On the train I'll be listening to audio books for the Odyssey Award committee;
• when I return home I have some reading to do for Kirkus Reviews.

I do like hats. I like how they look and how they feel, how each one makes me into a slightly different person. But sometimes having so many gets a little complicated.

I've seen some people in the blogosphere saying things like "the New York Times charging for online access to its articles oppresses poor people".

So, guys. I'm a librarian. Hell, I'm a digital archivist. I believe information was meant to be free. I live information was meant to be free.

And you know what's awesome? It is. In most parts of the United States, there are public libraries. Most of those public libraries have print subscription to the New York Times. In fact, most of the public libraries are part of larger networks which enable their users to plug their library card numbers into a website and get digital access to the most recent issues of the New York Times without ever leaving their seats. This is important, especially for people who live in rural areas, don't have transport to the library, or work unusual or excessive hours.

Does this mean that all of the linky-linking that goes on in the blogosphere, with people labeling their links "here" and not identifying the article in question by title or date, will be less accessible to people who don't pay the New York Times? Of course it does. But just because I believe information was meant to be free, doesn't mean that I believe that the New York Times is obliged to make it trivially easy for everybody to get free access to their expensively-generated content in the most easy way possible without doing any extra work. Bloggers can damn well learn to cite the articles they link to. The rest of us can learn how to login to our local library systems' databases.

You should note that the more you use your online library's databases, the higher their use statistics are, that they can then bring back to the town during budgeting sessions explaining how heavily used they are and how they should get more money to subscribe even more online databases. Supporting libraries for the win!

And as for supporting newspapers, well. I'm in the front lines of people bitching that most newspapers have stopped doing investigative journalism and instead just reprint wire pieces or post she said/he said controversies. But investigative journalism is expensive, and journalists asking to be paid is not oppressive.

(Libraries are awesome, guys. Of course I want you to be supporting your local independent bookstore, but remember you can always order books and DVDs via interlibrary loan! FREE.)

the Internet Archive launched a new service that brings free access to more than 1 million books — from classic 19th century fiction and current novels to technical guides and research materials — now available in the specially designed format to support those who are blind, dyslexic or are otherwise visually impaired.

More specifically, through its Open Library interface, the Internet Archive has released many of its e-books in DAISY format. DAISY format is a preferred format for many people who don't use print, and this is a real improvement over the frequent that is "but I put up a PDF so it's accessible" (frequently an untagged, inaccessible PDF). Thank you, Open Library.

diceytillerman on why fat politics mustn't fail at intersectionality, discusssing Beth Carswell's "The Skinny on Fat Fiction".

A fantastic linkspam on the Google Book settlement.

The amazing karenhealey on authors' input into cover design, whitewashed covers, and the politics of fat, race, attractiveness, and sales. (Lee Wind has more to say about whitewashed covers.)

The hijacking of the Victorian Internet. Actually quite fascinating!

The Public Domain Manifesto

I'm trying to close out many of my tabs, so I'm going to break this into two posts, one which is mostly about archival/open scholarship/library issues, and one which is about children's literature -- because I think my readership is kind of divided down the middle.

"diaries are a window into life of Kennedy daughter" was a story which really resonated with me as I struggle to learn the ethics of archivists. On the one hand, the diaries are an important part of the historical record, teaching us incredibly troubling things about Joe Kennedy in giving insights into many of the causes supported by Ted Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. On the other hand, their potential for harm to (at the time) living people was not small.

• "Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers to the Public" : closing the loopholes in copyright law which might make GPL and Creative Commons-type licenses unenforceable


• "Newsflash: professor visits library" really gets at the heart of the problem libraries have, from my perspective, which is an utter failure of advertising. I don't know how many times people have told me about this great new service that allows them to e-mail or text in a question and get an answer back.


• Peter Sefton's comments on trying to understand Elsevier's license terms are truly hysterical.

Yesterday, in the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives blog (tufts_dca), I talked about our newly-launched institutional repository, Tufts eScholarship. I'm very optimistic about the success of our IR, though there has been a lot of conversation in the IR world about what makes institutional repositories fail. The number one reason I'm optimistic about our IR: it's not what purists would call an institutional repository.

( I'd like to buy university digitization efforts a Coke and teach everyone how to work with each other: cut for length )

The decisions leading to this wonderful conjunction of circumstances all predate my presence here at the university by many years. I'm talking about this not to toot Tufts' horn, but to push this vital idea of collaboration. Even now, I see so many institutions in the repository space that have entirely orthogonal approaches within their own organizations. The people digitizing images aren't talking to the people digitizing texts aren't talking to the people dealing with digital records aren't talking to the people doing institutional repository. Sure, maybe you would never use the same software platform or workflow approaches for all of these efforts. But maybe you will. Maybe instead of getting six different perfect software packages, you will find something that is good enough for all of you, and uses only one license, a smaller number of technical support staff, and something which will continue to be supported by your university even if hard economic times make some of the digital collections look less important.

Heck, I'm looking at this entirely selfishly, and you should too. In tough economic times, digital archives might go by the wayside. Open access institutional repositories are still untested. But management of the university's digital records is never going to be unnecessary. Work with other people instead of merely alongside them, intertwine your jobs, and you will not just save your institution money and resources, but you will increase the number of ways in which you are vital. Job security FTW.

Public.Resource.org's suggestions to Obama's transition team on improving public domain access to government resources are fabulous. I hadn't known about FedFlix [FedFlix on the Internet archive, Fedflix on YouTube], but what a fabulous resource: Public.Resource.org and NTIS teamed up together to make public domain digital copies of many government videotapes.

Or how about their idea for The Library of the USA, which would not only create a fantastic archival series of curated documents, but would be a nice New Deal-style public works jobs program in a time where even libertarians are beginning to realize we need one.

And nobody can deny that right now high-speed Internet access is part of enfranchisement in modern society, and a program to bring high-speed Internet to more rural parts of America would be fabulous.

We are in prime time to do both so much good and so much harm. Traditionally, government information has been printed by the GPO, an organization which knows that its mandate from United States code includes permanent public access, and knows that all work of the United States government is in the public domain. Their digitization efforts include an understanding of the public domain. But these days, the US government publishes many documents directly to the Web, without involving the GPO, and the individual departments responsible for that publication can be unaware of their responsibilities to the public. Comedians make jokes about Dick Cheney and his shredder, but the problem goes beyond illegal government programs and secret laws. Evil people will always do evil, and it's our responsibility to stop them, but a lot of what's going on now is just carelessness and ignorance. If government departments don't know they have a responsibility to publish into the public domain, if by bypassing the FDLP with direct-to-Web publication they don't realize they are bypassing a mandate to permanent public access, then it doesn't take any evil whatsoever to deny the public our right to permanent access to these public domain materials.

Some government offices, such as the Government Accountability Office, are already on the right track. Let's make sure the new administration keeps us going the right way.

If I'm going to be teaching a class, and my institution doesn't have an Open Courseware instance, how should I put up the course materials? CC-licensed on my own site? Connexions? Something else?

This wonderful. The Nebraska Library commission has been making archived copies of Creative Commons published works and cataloging them into their OPAC. They aren't doing this indiscriminately; they are only grabbing works which are in line with their collection development policy. They are also making spiral-bound printed copies of those works for which the license allows it, and shelving them in the physical collection.

What a fabulous, fabulous mashup of old and new.

(And does it say something about my reading habits that I got this link from lisnews and not from boingboing?)

In the last few years, all of the conferences I have been to have had rather fabulous keynote speakers. I don't recall this being the case in the past. Maybe it's just that I'm really interested in libraries, information, and changing technology, and there are some great speakers in that field.

(Though would be nice to have some female or nonwhite keynote speakers every once in a great while. I mean, Brewster Kahle is my Internet boyfriend, and only somebody crazy would skip a Jonathan Zittrain talk, but still. Just once in a great while. Somebody not white and/or male?)

( John Willinsky. Sorting and Classifying the Open Access issues for Digital Libraries: Issues Technical, Economic, Philosophical, and Principled  )