The wonderful CBC Radio show Search Engine has posted an interview with Minister Prentice (MP3), where he hums and haws on a number of listener submitted questions.

Then the host Jesse Brown gets to the real issue with the law: while it allows for a number of different fair dealing rights, all of those rights are taken away by the fact that breaking any “digital lock,” digital rights management, or technical protection measure is a violation of copyright, regardless of the rights of the individual involved. This includes copying DRM’d CDs to your iPod, unlocking your phone to use overseas, or playing DVDs on Linux which requires an unauthorized decryption of some discs.

As Prentice is fighting to get off the phone, he comes out with the real motivation behind his copyright legislation: the free hand of the market will decide whether producers create works DRM’d up the wazoo, or whether demand will head towards unencrypted works which facilitate our legal rights.

I don’t want to say that the government grants us these rights. Copyright, the property right granted to creators as incentive for them to continue to create, is an artificial creation of society. Information cannot be owned, and the first pirates of the printing press will show. Society is gifting this right to creators, it is not inherent in their act of creation. So to say that the government is giving us fair use rights is incorrect: these are the rights we retain for ourselves. The right to quote for democratic and academic discourse. The right to make secure copies incase our original is destroyed. The right to enter interlibrary loan agreements. And the right to enjoy our purchased product in whatever manner we choose.

Prentice and the government sees a future where whatever freedoms we have with our cultural products are only those which are given by corporations, (or the “market”, as if a free and equal one exists). This is again the error of submitting what we hold as most dear to the logic of the market–add to this health care and education, which I am sure Harper would love to get his hands on (or off).

Actually, perhaps Prentice is correct. Maybe the market will rule, and people will stop buying these goods from large companies, and go back to a time when individuals interacted directly with the artists and creators themselves. While this required one to be a travelling musician in the past, now all one needs is five thousand dollars of recording equipment and a pretty website to make money. And I don’t think those dinosaurs in business and government have understood that reality yet.

The first part of the book details that myth, from Marshal McLuhan to Alvin Toffler to Nicholas Negroponte. What I am enjoying right now is the second half, which goes on to show that other technological developments where lauded in their time with the exact same language that we use to describe the Internet.

Any of these quotes sound familiar:

The Telegraph

• “the nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world.”
• “Our whole human existence is being transformed.”

Electrification

• “It is no longer a matter of choice whether or not one shall become acquainted with the general facts and principles of electric science. Such an acquaintance has become a matter of necessity. So intimately does electricity enter into our everyday life that to know nothing of its peculiar properties or applications is, to say the least, to be severely handicapped in the struggle for existence.” (does this call for Electronic Literacy anyone?)

The Telephone

• the harbinger of “a new social order”
• “a moral obligation for a considerate husband and a good citizen.”
• This would lead to an acceleration of democracy in politics and social life since we are all equals on the telephone.
• others welcomed the likely breakdown in class and family boundaries.

Radio

• “the greatest force yet developed by man in his march down the slopes of time.
• “a means for general and perpetual peace on earth.”
• “it has restored the demos upon which republican government is founded.”
• “Every home has the potentiality of becoming an extension of Carnegie Hall or Harvard University.”

Television

• “a torch of hope in a troubled world” (seriously!)
• will make “the attendance of classes in any one place…as obsolete as the buggy of twenty-five years ago”
• “television will usher in a new era of friendly intercourse between the nations of the earth”
• The new medium was predicted to be so potent that writers began to speak of a “pre-television” era and admonished those who were foolish enough to cling to the “habits of thinking” that characterized this time as “trapped in another anachronism.” (Library 2.0?)
• “Television is no instrument of imperialism. It belongs to the people as does radio. It comes at a time in history when the world needs to have an eye kept upon it for the welfare of civilization.”
• Additional examples give new hope for community television in low-income areas, for direct contact with candidates for electoral office, and for a transformation in the quantity and quality of citizen communication with government officials.
• “an “information highway.”

What Mosco is arguing is that, sooner or later, all of these new technologies become banal. He notes at one point that the average home now has 8 radios. Where the telephone was once seen by people as some kind of mythological device, now we do not think twice about it. In the 1930’s television was to be this great democratic and educational tool–now we see it as exactly the opposite.

So too with the Internet. This honeymoon many of us are still having with the Internet, and certain sub-technologies on the Internet (Blogs/Tagging/Social Software will save the world!) will quickly come to the end as new youngsters cease seeing the technology around them as something sacred, but as something purely profane.

This has been all over the news here in Toronto, but I have not read about it in any of my feeds yet, which is weird given the rush to get libraries on Facebook.

Here is the story. Chris Avenir, a first year engineering student at Ryerson University, was charged with 147 counts of academic misconduct because he was the administrator of a Facebook study group for a chemistry class. The 147 stems from the fact that the group had that many students in it when the administration found out about it.

The school argues that, because the site of the group said “If you request to join, please use the forms to discuss/post solutions to the chemistry assignments. Please input your solutions if they are not already posted,” and the 10 percent assignments were to be done individually, then he was soliciting cheating. Students and others argue that Facebook is only a virtual meeting place and is just the same as forming a face-to-face study group, which the university has implicitly allowed in similar circumstances as this.

The administration argues that cheating is cheating, regardless of where it happens. “This is being painted as a generational issue and it’s not,” said James Norrie, director of the Toronto university’s School of Information Technology. “We are not a bunch of old farts who are afraid of technology.”

Two Questions

First, should the student be expelled, considering 1. He did not start the group, but only took over its administration after a time; 2. No actual answers to any of the questions were posted, and it is my understanding that each student received a different assignment, so in actuality exact answers couldn’t have been posted anyway. 3. 147 counts? Just because there were that many in the group? Come on.

The second question is whether we should consider this cheating at all, or, does the defense of “it is only a virtual study group” hold up? Don’t have an answer, because I don’t know the motivation of every student, particularly Chris Avenir, and he should not be held accountable for the misconduct of every student. He didn’t “facilitate” cheating, like some college movie where the frat house steals the exam. If any one facilitated something it was Facebook itself.

Implications for Libraries

Some colleagues of mine at school were discussing the implications for libraries setting up a presence on Facebook. Should the school set up policies on virtual collaboration before hand (we thought that he was not guilty unless they has specified so before hand). What about the library setting up a Facebook group: is it important for us us to make sure that no dishonesty goes on in the forums? Do we need to establish explicit policy before hand?

If so, is it important for us to make sure no dishonesty goes on in our physical space? I think this must happen every day. So why is there a difference when we are somewhat responsible for the virtual space we set up? What is the theoretical difference between the two?

Update: If you want to rally for the student, ChrisDidntCheat.com

As Catherine Sheldrick Ross and others have said, reading is a social activity. Books are borrowed, lent, shared, resold and bought second hand. They are picked up on the street, left on busses and passed among families at Christmas and amongst book club members. And until these e-books have the same liberalities as hard cover books (unless publishers deliberately kill them, as I can see with textbooks), paper books will be here for a while.

Every see a homeless person with an e-book reader? Yet, I always see them with a paperback. Who can imagine a hippy backpacking across Asia with his or her well worn copy of Siddhartha in their back pocket? Yes, an idealistic idea, but not very possible with the Kindle.

So I direct you all to read dive in to mark’s post “The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)” with some telling quotes. I’ll include one here:

Act VI: The act of learning If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.

Ankit Gupta

School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was. Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Just to let you know, Library Five-0 is all about technology:

Some of the twopointopians claim that Library 2.0 isn’t just about technology, that it’s just the stuff librarians have always been doing, or would have been doing if they weren’t such evil librarians and we weren’t such good librarians. We know that’s malarkey, because if that was the case there would be no need to coin such a stupid phrase to describe something that is already going on. Unless of course the point is to coin a stupid phrase to make it seem like we’re doing something new when we really aren’t, which will allow a few of us to congratulate ourselves in a heated circle-blog and get ourselves invited to conferences so we can talk about all this stuff that’s old but that we’ve somehow made to seem new. No, wait, that’s getting too complicated.

In conclusion: “Remember, I’m right and you’re wrong, and if you disagree with me it’s just because you don’t get it and don’t love the library users as much as I do.”

Ah, AL, I’d present a paper about flashy shirts in the library at your L5-0 conference any day.

An insightful addition to the discussion:

I’m all for finding out what our users want and how they want to get it. I’m also for attempting to guide our users towards quality materials and services and I’m afraid that often Library 2.0 chastises librarians who hold this belief.

I don’t think this chastising is unique to Library 2.0, but it does crop up in a lot of the rhetoric so-called progressive librarians make and have made against so-called conservative librarians. We’ve heard it before in the Reader’s Advisory movement of the 1980’s: who are we to say what reading is good and bad. And now, who are we to say what information outlets are good and bad. We should, as they argue, give them what they want.

I wrote a recent essay examining which is more democratic, the imperative of the library to inform and educate its citizenry, or to give them the materials they request, because they have paid for them. It is a difficult balance to walk–I don’t know if my essay came up with a sufficient answer. Will post it later.

Whatever happens between Wikipedia and Citizendium, here’s what Wales and Sanger cannot be forgiven for: They have taken the encyclopedia out of the high school library, where it belongs, and turned it into some kind of totem of “human knowledge.” Who the hell goes to an encyclopedia looking for “truth,” anyway? You go to an encyclopedia when you can’t remember whether it was Cortez or Balboa who killed Montezuma or when you want to find out which countries border Turkey. What normal people want from an encyclopedia is not truth but accuracy. And figuring out whether something is accurate or not does not require thousands of words of epistemological hand-wringing. If it jibes with the facts, it’s accurate. If it doesn’t, it ain’t. One of the reasons Wikipedia so often gets a free pass is that it pretends it’s in the truth business rather than the accuracy business. That’s bullshit, but people seem to buy it.

The encyclopedia is a reference source. And like I have said before, anyone who cites any encyclopedia at the end of a paper who is older than 14 needs to be reeducated. This is not a paper/digital distinction, but a “fact”/”knowledge” distinction.

The dilemma: every once and and a while, hell often every day, there will be some really good posts that come through in this category. Thought provoking, interesting, cool or infuriating posts.

However, to find those posts I have to slog through hundreds of daily one line or one image posts which are along the lines of “Twitter LOLZ!!!” or some other such things which I won’t repeat. People have a right to publish whatever they want on their space, this is not a call for an improvement of the blog medium.

My issue is this. These good posts do not come uniformly from any one source. Lots of different people write different interesting things at different times. I have only 71 total feeds, with most of them library feeds. That is a small amount compared to the number which I know someone like Walt Crawford monitors. However, I have this low number because I have removed almost half of the number of library feeds I read. It used to be a lot worse. But, I feel like I need to do this again.

I look at my bookshelves and I see Paradise Lost and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and Anarchy, State and Utopia unread. I think of Montaigne and Emerson and E. B. White and how I want to learn to write essays like them. And I feel anxious at the thought of having to wade through not even the coal but the piles sand, gravel, and disposable plastic use-once-and-never-consider-again pieces of waste, to find the diamonds online. I wish LISNews and the Carnival of the Infosciences did a better job of providing me a digest format of all that went on in the biblioblogsohere. The former does have “This week in LIbraryBlogLand” but for some reason the formating doesn’t come through on me reader and I usually skip it. If anyone else could recommend a good weekly review I will take the suggestion.

In the mean time, I am cutting my feeds down to the bare minimum. I am not a reactionary, and while I think Library 2.0 is just laughable (particularly now that everyone is talking about Twitter), I do think that the Internet is just an amazing hotbed of creativity. I am just having such difficulty sifting the good stuff out from the filler.

Elaine Peterson has written a very interesting article looking at some of the philosophical contingencies of user tagging of folksonomy, something which I think is very necessary and I was happy to see.

In her introduction she makes the important point that, regardless of what one’s metaphysical or ontological beliefs are, for classification purposes, Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction must apply. A book cannot be both A and not-A if we considering its classification. She rightly notes: “It is irrelevant that digital items can reside in more than one place, since one is talking about a classification scheme, not about the items themselves.”

However, I disagree with her second introductory point, that the cataloguer, like the librarian, should be neutral and follow the intent of the author. It is questionable, in the first place, whether we can even access the intent of the author (see Foucault, Barthes, Derrida). Nevertheless, as cataloguers and librarians our charge is not the book, but the user, and we should look at things from their perspective. Our “neutrality” does not come from following the author–creation mythologies are not in science, they are in religion; Hannibal Lecter’s guide to kidneys and fava beans is not under culinary arts, but deviant psychology. Thus Peterson’s assertion: “the goal is to recognize the author’s intent over others’ interpretation,” is flawed. There is a social aspect to classification: no matter how much the author wishes or believes, a fictional account cannot be placed in the non-fiction section.

She then goes on about folksonomies, noting their oft repeated benefits and detriments, and makes the claim that “philosophical relativism appears to be the underlying philosophy behind folksonomies.” Beyond synonym and typographical errors, it is possible that users might tag an item with directly contrary tags, violating Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. Her example, a picture of a white horse could be tagged both “black horse” and “white horse.” In her view this is detrimental to searching and retrieval.

The critique I can give to her position is that classification schemes give only the illusion of order and hierarchy where it doesn’t truly exist. We all know that classifications have their own cultural–i.e. relativist–biases. What we don’t like to admit is that these classification systems come from not only group discussion and agreement amongst professionals, but also the cultural environment where the system is developed. And societies will cover over the fact that the classification systems used to define its reality have no fundamental basis (Foucault). Peterson doesn’t consider the possibility that reality is relativist, thereby making “traditional” classification are static, possibly not reflective of current cultural beliefs, or even the tool of dominate power structures. This is not something I am arguing is true, mind you, but traditional classifications do have their own philosophical problems.

Which is exactly why controlled and natural vocabulary classifications should live together, within one bibliographic record. This is all possible within the OPAC. Not only for the fact that folksonomies can highlight the inherent biases within a classification system, but for the very fact that cataloguers make mistakes, they miss classify, or they miss a subject heading which could apply. And, at the same time, controlled vocabularies can serve as a stable reference point.

However, I think Peterson’s article raises some excellent points for discussion, and I recommend you read it.

Nor does the barrier-free access seem to have begun yet. Here’s a public-domain 1897 edition of MacBeth scanned from Harvard’s library. I can print it one page at a time, but I can’t find a way to print or download the full text.

Maybe things have changed since his post, but I found this copy of Macbeth with a full PDF download on the right side. Not only that, but more interesting are the various commentaries on the play, histories of Scotland and the Anglo-Saxons and other works from the 18th and 19th century. Nothing from the 20th, even outside copyright (isn’t it pre-1923?). Here is a search for “Macbeth” only in those books with full text available.

As I future librarian I hold reservations about giving one company so much power, but just the possibility of reading some textual commentary from the 19th Century raises more than a few good avenues for research off the top of my head and gives me academic goosebumps.

The uniqueness of Wikipedia is that, unlike the traditional models of creation, dissent is included in the presentation. That is, unlike a traditional encyclopedia which might frame a debate as entirely or mostly one-sided, the collaborative nature of Wikipedia illustrates how ideas work in the real world. Most topics, especially as you move away from the purely abstract to the purely concrete, don’t exist in a state of total one-sided consensus. If there is a heated debate surrounding a topic or issue, is that not in itself worthy of being known by the end user, by the very fact that it allows the reader to make an educated choice for his- or herself? Is it not information, part of the truth of the issue that such a debate exists?

While Britannica might make a note of the fact that “A certain minority of scientists disagree with the mating habits of the chimpanzee, and believe X opposed to Y,” a well-written Wikipedia article (and I don’t think this even approaches a majority) will have the same debate going on on a microcosmic scale right in the article and talk pages. A well-sourced article will have the sources for the debate right in the talk pages and the footnotes.

Again, I think at times Wikipedia is very bad, but when it is good, it is good in an entirely different way than the traditional model: not for its writing quality, but for its ability to allow dissent, not just with a single passing note, but within its very structure, within the structure of the article itself.

Bob writes:

The Wikipedia is a quite different sort of publication, which frankly needs to be read in a new way. Jaron focuses on the “finished piece”, ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic’s many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent; indeed the “truth” is likely to be found in the interstices, where different points of view collide.

I agree to an extent, but I would frame it this way: it is not just that truth is found in the collision, in the “interstices” of the collision, but that the truth necessarily includes the collisions, as wholly part of itself, without assimilation, synthesis or aufgehoben.

I think this is somewhat of an enlightening notion, that we can go beyond the childishness of the debate to include the debate itself in our worldview

1. A move to abandoning the LC system of headings (essentially leaving categorization to Google-like keyword searches and Amazon-like user recommendations)
2. To accept digital copies of those works not “born digital”, i.e. books, in place of their paper representation on a physical shelf.

The goal the administration of the LC has with these measurements is to bring the libraries into the “digital age”—however, Mann finds major faults with these developments and their move to exclude traditional methods of research. Furthermore Mann is not arguing from a position of ludditism or a desire to cling to the “dying book”. On the contrary, if we read his past works, Mann praises the computer as allowing new avenues for finding information that researchers would not found otherwise. However, Mann does call for caution against digital searches taking the place of traditional methods of browsing; rather, the two are naturally complimentary.

What Mann argues, far from helping the “modern user” of the library, is that these developments actually hinder the ability to complete through research. The “skewed vision” the administration has of users is the “lazy undergraduate” who would rather remain in their dorm room in front of their computer rather then walk the distance to the library to perform such outdated tasks as looking at a book. The vision, one held as far back as Leibniz, is of the Universal library, where every piece of information would be only a keyword or two away. The problem with this, however, is that the keyword search is not the sole, or even main, way in which scholars perform research. Mann cites usability surveys noting that 52% of respondents actually (gasp) go to the stacks to do research. 1

What benefits those who work beyond a simple one or two term Google-like search:

1. LC subject headings give the marked benefit of browsing by subject. Mann cites an instance where a researcher had done a catalogue search for “Yugoslavia” and “history”, and of course come up with an overwhelming number or matches. However, a quick browse through the more manageable Subject browse not only granted the researcher needed focus, but also outlined some areas of research which is first keyword search had missed entirely.While it could be argued that a better educated searcher could use keywords more appropriately, I sincerely doubt that the “lazy undergrad” could do so. Yet, as a supplement to keyword searches, categorical browsing allows for an additional level of flexibility.

   The Google software cannot display browse menus of subjects with subdivisions and cross-references, allowing researchers to simply recognize options that they cannot specify in advance [because they are unknown at the time of the initial search]. Library catalogs provide much more efficient and systematic overviews of the range of books relevant to any topic….While the Google project may enhance information seeking, it will greatly curtail scholarship—which requires connections, linkages, and overviews.

2. Secondly, and this is the point which struck me the most, is the notion of serendipitous browsing. This is the activity by which researchers go to a subject classified section and discover books which one had not set out to discover.

   One survey elicited the finding that “The importance of serendipitous browsing in library collections cannot be overemphasized by the majority of faculty space holders.”

   This requires that the libraries, despite the possibilities of computer organization, continue to arrange books on actual, accessible, shelves by a pre-determined subject classification. This also means that libraries cannot shuffle under used books off to book warehouses while digital copies remain on file.

What struck me by this is the fact that, true to the survey, much of my own research is done through the discovery of books in adjacent sections to the one I set out to retrieve. Mann gives the example, which I won’t go into, of a book discovery which would be next to impossible, even through a full-text Google search, but occurred through serendipitous browsing (hopefully this can become a technical term for this action).

Arguably user-initiated linking could allow for such connections to be made. However, there is the epistemological problem of how does one make connections before the connection itself has already been made? If two works or topics are already linked, then in essence the research itself is already done. How does a scholar make connections that have not been thought before? Often serendipitously, a fact Mann has gleaned from his 25 years of practical experience working at the Library of Congress.

This is not to say that Mann is decrying the use of computers for research. On the contrary, his printed works, Library Research Models for example, repeatedly praise the possibilities for research through computers; at the same time, they give a caution to balance one’s research through all avenues possible. And, in any event, this itself is the sign of a good researcher. And it should be our job as information professionals to train the “lazy undergrad” to use all means possible in their searches.

I think that this is the main point we have to remember. All of these things are not difficult to implement. Let us have Google-like searches, Amazon-like ratings and Del.icio.us-like tagging alongside subject classification. We can gain much from folksonomies, and we don’t have to do so at the loss of traditional hierarchical ontologies. The digital catalogue is flexible enough for both.

However, to limit ourselves to such simple searches is to, in Mann’s words, condemn ourselves to research which is “superficial, incomplete, haphazard, indiscriminate, biased toward recent works, and largely confined to English language sources.”

Here is the story, for those that don’t go to U of T. The main branch of the library, the fourteen floor Robarts, denies access to anyone who cannot flash a student, faculty or alumni card. The printed versions of all journals, if we even continue to receive them, are behind this barrier.

One of the main arguments in support for OA is that members of the general public, like Xuan-Yen, cannot access the electronic versions of journals. However, at U of T, you can’t even access the daily paper delivered versions of the New York Times, because they are on the forth floor, and access beyond the third is restricted to those with a library card. Xuan-Yen is not an anthropologist, nutritionist, or even a professional chef. She just likes to educate herself. She graduated successfully with a BA, and wishes to continue with her personal learning, for the pure pleasure of learning. She just gets excited about food, from the preparation to the history and politics of food. And she cannot do that under current conditions.

Well, partially, because to solve my ethical dilemma I told her about OA. Regardless, why should I be placed in an ethical dilemma in the first place? Having done my undergraduate degree in Philosophy, it is my belief that giving the opportunity for learning to someone should be the highest and greatest gift, and one of the most ethically sound choices.

A lot of what I am going to be researching is the fact that, at the beginning of the university, works were copied freely–in fact, to study almost necessitated free copying, which was a natural action to those working under manuscript culture. Digital culture works much in the same way, where reading necessitates making a copy, in every instance. Copying is essential and fundamental to digital communication.

So what happens? Peter Suber, the academic king of OA, links to her.

Ah shucks…..