libary=pirate bay

This snack from Publisher’s Lunch reported from BEA caught my eye:

Macmillan’s John Sargent underscored that “you shouldn’t focus on Google as the danger point; the danger is what Google enables in making a copy and giving it to libraries,” whose mission to is disseminate information for free. “It becomes a very dangerous world when piracy exists, most importantly,” Sargent said, “to get control of the digital copies that libraries are going to have.”

On noes! Free copies!! Agghhh, run for your lives!!!

But, uh . . . the books being digitized belong to the libraries. And they can’t share the digital versions without getting their asses sued. So what are you so worried about, exactly? That pirates will hack Hathi Trust?

Why aren’t you all freaked out about that search inside full text at Amazon? Oh, right! [smacks head] They sell books, so they’re okay. None of that scary free stuff. Whew.

“it’s not clear”

Wired weighs in on U Mich’s renegotiation with the Google Books library project, and the title pretty well sums up their interpretation “UMich gets Better Deal in Google’s Library of the Future Project.” (Is that what’s called now? Cripes. All your book are belong to us.)

What cracks me up is the final, puzzled line.

Google will sell full-text access to all the books in its index to libraries and institutions, but critics say the price of that will be set very high . . .

That’s why giving UM (and possibly the other scanning libraries) some method to contest the price matters. But it’s not clear why UM would protest the pricing of such institutional subscriptions, because the changes also mean Google will subsidize the entire cost of UM’s institutional subscriptions.

Man, these guys truly do not get libraries!

why information literacy is a hard sell

As they are wont to do, a bunch of random ideas have just caromed off each other. This is your brain. This is your brain on a billiard table.

First, I was mulling over a funny thing that happened on a writers’ list. Someone asked a question about a medication. Another member, a librarian, pointed out a couple of wonderful resources where you can get answers to questions like hers. A third member said “here’s the answer. I’m a doctor.” And the chorus of replies was “Thank you so much! I always turn to experts! If I do my own research, I have to read too much and it’s confusing and some of it may be wrong.” Basically – “damn you, librarians, and your your tools of ambiguity; your solution requires judgment, and I don’t trust mine. Also, it’s work. Bah!”

So here’s the trouble with this thing we librarians believe in so passionately and have named so badly – information literacy. “I don’t want to think for myself, because its hard work and I might get it wrong; I just want an answer. Libraries are useless because they have far too many.”

That particular doctor was no doubt trustworthy. But what about those times when he’s not there, or it’s not his specialty? On this list you ask and hope someone who sounds credible pipes in with an answer.”Here’s a good place to look it up” is not a welcome suggestion.

What this collided with was in my billiard-table brain was some campaign folderol in the past twenty-four hours. McCain made a speech blasting Obama for only now going to Afghanistan. How could anyone possibly hold any informed opinion about a country in conflict if he hadn’t climbed off a plane and stood on its soil surrounded by cameras and heavily-armed security?

My immediate thought was “well, Obama does know how to read.”

I’m not saying expertise or first-hand experience is unimportant. But we have to make judgments all the time about things that we don’t know first hand and haven’t made our profession. We have to read and we have to winnow and yes, it’s work. But doing that work is the only way we can be free human beings. Weighing evidence is a skill everyone needs. You can defer to the experts, but sometimes they’re wrong or they’re biased or they’re lying, something Karl Rove turned into a science.

Sometimes, you have to think for yourself.

How do you learn to do that? That’s the hard part, but it should be what education is all about.

photo courtesy of jpstanley

in the meanwhile . . .

I’m slowly adding some photos from my trip to flickr. I think this one’s my favorite. I was heading toward the Mystery Company in Carmel Indiana (home of the nation’s first stoplight, but they moved on to better things – roundabouts everywhere) taking the scenic route through Indianapolis, and bumped into their public library. I hear it was beset by delays, cost overruns, lawsuits and all manner of conflict, but the final result is awesome. It blends a classic grand library, beautifully restored, with a glass-and-shiny-bits contemporary building, the two joined with a swooping atrium.

But best of all – secret staircases! I don’t think the door was meant to be open, and when I looked again it was shut and locked.

hot off the shelf

I have a new post up at Free Exchange on Campus about a biology professor and evangelical Christian who has been told he can no longer teach intro courses because he wrote a book that said you could hold evangelical beliefs and still accept evolution as a scientific principle. The book is now banned from course assigned reading lists at his school, Olivet Nazarene – it had been used in by more than one department.

But, ha! their library has four copies – one is currently checked out. Nanner, nanner, nanner.

LibraryThing in the Philly Inquirer

Katie Haegele, who writes an interesting column for the Philadelphia Inquirer on things digital and literary, has just published an article on LibraryThing. She has an extensive zine collection and was pleased to find, when she started to catalog them, that Jenna Freedman of Barnard (where she is curator of a great zine collection) had already cataloged a good many of them, and those records could be pulled into LibraryThing and shared. Jenna (who creates her own zine, by the by, titled Lower East Side Librarian) put her in touch with me as a certified Thingoholic and librarian. So we chatted about how LT tagging and social functions are a DIY response to the withering of cataloging in libraries and as a fun example of the social dimensions of reading.

Now, if I could just figure out why OCLC is so expensive and LibraryThing is so free . . .

what if you ran your library like a corporation?

Well, now you can! Fire those librarians, lock the doors, starve your communities of books and information – then hire a for-profit company to run it. That’s what Jackson County, Oregon is doing.

One of the head honchos of the LSSI Corp that got this contract once wrote a truly disturbing article for American Libraries. The title asked an interesting question – “What if You Ran Your Library Like a Bookstore?” I thought of some of the wonderful independent bookstores that could teach us a thing or two – like Once Upon a Crime or Uncle Edgar’s in Minneapolis. But no, turns out he meant “like B&N.” Have all the books selected by a head office somewhere else, get rid of reference assistance because it’s not popular enough, hire low-wage workers, sell expensive coffee. Well, he took his own advice. Now he’s running public libraries like a corporation.

Public libraries in the US have always had a local flavor and have been considered a public good – like public safety and education (not like trash collection and road maintenance, two often-outsourced government functions mentioned in the article). This just stinks.

more library porn

No, they don’t look especially user-friendly, and there don’t appear to be any small-group study rooms or coffee shops around. But still …

the bookmomule

Some of us have fond memories of bookmobiles, those lumbering trucks full of books on tilted shelves that pull up to a parking lot and magically become a library. BoingBoing calls our attention to biliomulas, sure-footed mules that bring books to remote villages in Venezuela. Visit Auntie Beeb to read all about it.

Hello, New York!

So I was in New York for a couple of days and wandered into this wonderful branch of the NYPL in the East Village. Very old-fashioned shelving on two stories with cloudy glass (!) floors on the second level, presumably to let light in. Though it’s tiny, there were computers in the front, all in use, computers in the children’s room upstairs, also all in use, books in many different languages, and all in all a lively, warm, feel. How nice that it’s modern without being modernized. The exterior is a warm red color.

I also, naturally had to say hello to Patience and Fortitude while I was there.

And I finally got up to Barnard to visit their zine collection and fire lots of reference questions at Jenna, who was working the desk that day. Too bad the pictures didn’t come out better, but I only had my cell phone with me.