Entries tagged with “libraries” from Tools of Change for Publishing
The Barack SlideShow
Peter Brantley
November 8, 2008
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President-elect Obama has been very vocal about embracing an open government policy, and so far the signs are promising. See, for example, this page linked off Obama's public transition Web site, which lists resources reserved for incoming presidential teams -- it is both interesting and amusing to read texts discussing these essential change-of-governance issues along the lines of "Helping make your transition into government as easy as possible." It's historically rare to get a glimpse of national government continuance aided, as it must inevitably be, by the institutional bureaucracy's production of documents akin to a special issue of Make on "How to be President of the United States."
Equally interesting is the set of images of Barack Obama and his family backstage on election night, and proceeding into his acceptance speech. What's notable is that the images are fairly informal -- and they are on Flickr. This kind of photostream -- not unique in itself -- would previously, a generation ago, have been highly curated, entitled "The new presidential family waits for news," and published the week following in Life or Look magazine. However, the Obama pictures appear less curated (or at least have that air), were published nearly instantly, and do not involve the mediation of traditional media. In fact, whether these are eventually printed or not as official administration photos is secondary, because they are available freely and publicly online.
Without benefit of any mainstream media publicity, the pictures were so popular that they brought down Flickr. Thus, this is an event worthy of notice: an expectation of democratic transparency in a federal government combined with a mere decade plus-old publishing infrastructure jointly craft a community around the globe. In a sense, the limited access of the photographer on that election night make this a callback to the effect of TV in the 1950s, when monolithic media broadcast a culture that was shared and discussed in the conversations of millions. Yet the means of this publication, and the premise of sharing, are profoundly different.
I think there's one other interesting point to note. Up until this presidency, documentation such as the photoshoot routinely went en masse into archives, where it later established the basis for the Presidential Library. However, existing Presidential Libraries such as LBJ's or JFK's are faced with the challenge of reaching back into their collections to digitize materials and make them widely accessible, and they face significant policy, logistical, and funding challenges in doing so. The Obama administration will be publishing a great deal of material outbound -- a digitally native presidency -- at a magnitude far beyond any of its predecessors.
When archives are built incrementally on top of access, instead of access being born of hard labor from accumulated storage, the nature of the archive is transformed. The possibilities for an Obama Presidential Library -- built from today and onwards -- are transformative.
Philadelphia Closing 11 Library Branches
Peter Brantley
November 7, 2008
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The financial crisis is having a huge negative impact on many public sector services, including libraries. From Publishers Lunch (subscription required):
As municipalities across the country face large gaps in their budget, Philadelphia is taking "drastic new steps" to face the "economic storm" that include closing 11 of the 54 branch libraries that comprise the Free Library of Philadelphia. Three other branches will have Sunday hours eliminated. Mayor Michael Nutter said the branches were chosen "after careful review of building conditions, utilization and distance to other libraries in the Free Library system." Cutting 220 jobs throughout the city government, approximately one third of those layoffs will come from the library staff.
Google Responds to Some Book Search Questions
Mac Slocum
November 6, 2008
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Shortly after last week's Google Book Search announcement, Siva Vaidhyanathan posed a number of questions about the agreement's impact on publishers, libraries and consumers.
Google responded, and today Vaidhyanathan offers paraphrased answers and additional analysis:
The agreements with and about publishers, libraries, and the registry were all non-exclusive, as is the habit and tradition of Google's approach to competition in the Web business. The registry will be started with Google funds, but it will be an idependent non-profit that may deal with the Open Content Alliance and other services without restriction from Google. Generally, Google's lawyers don't see this service as presenting a "typical anti-trust" problem. There are so many segments to the book market in the world, including real bookstores, online stores such as Amazon.com, and used-book outlets that no one may set prices for books (even out-of-print books) effectively. There is always a competing source - including libraries themselves.
There's additional coverage in Vaidhyanathan's post.
A Call for Tiered Access to Google Book Search Terminals
Mac Slocum
November 4, 2008
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Peter Brantley says proposed public access (pdf) to Google Book Search library terminals is too restrictive, particularly in areas serving underprivileged populations:
This is not an economic matter; it is a social foundation. A library is a refuge; you can provide solace in that refuge, and a promise for a different and better kind of future. It is morally incumbent upon you to do so.
I propose that public terminals be accessible on a tiered basis. If a certain percentage of a public library's served population falls beneath the poverty level or a similar metric, the number of public access terminals is commensurately increased.
Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement
Mac Slocum
October 29, 2008
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Updated 10/30, 7:53 AM -- Publishing experts, bloggers and interested parties are weighing in on the Google Book Search settlement. I'll be updating this post as new material comes in. If you see something that deserves notice please post a comment:
Posts Added October 30
On the Google Book Search agreement
(Larry Lessig, Lessig Blog)
The hard question for the registry is how far they will go to support the range of business models that authors and publishers might have. E.g., Yale Press "Books Unbound" and Bloomsbury Academic both have Creative Commons licensed authors. Will the registry enable that fact to be recognized? Indeed, though the comment was made by someone from the plaintiffs' side that it would be "perverse" for authors to choose free licensing, it is perfectly plausible that an author would choose to make his or her work available freely electronically, but contract with one commercial publisher to deal with selling the physical book, or licensing rights commercially. That, again, is the Bloomsbury Academic business model. Ideally, this non-profit should encourage the widest range of rights-respecting business models. One clear signal about what kind of organization this is will come from this.
Posts Added October 29
My initial take on the Google-publishers settlement
(Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything)
From the beginning, this has seemed to be a major example of corporate welfare. Libraries at public universities all over this country (including the one that employs me) have spent many billions of dollars collecting these books. Now they are just giving away access to one company that is cornering the market on on-line access. They did this without concern for user confidentiality, preservation, image quality, search prowess, metadata standards, or long-term sustainability. They chose the expedient way rather than the best way to build and extend their collections.
Short Term Profits Over Long Term Principles; Google's Caving On Book Scanning Is Bad News (Mike Masnick, Techdirt)
... it's quite upsetting to see Google cave on this. The settlement does not establish any sort of precedent on the legality of creating such an index of books, and, if anything pushes things in the other direction, saying that authors and publishers now have the right to determine what innovations there can be when it comes to archiving and indexing works of content. Unfortunately, this was really inevitable. As was the case with Google caving on YouTube and the Associated Press, it becomes a situation where Google realizes it can throw a little cash at the problem to make it go away -- while also creating a large barrier to entry for any more innovative startup. From a short-term business perspective this might make sense, but from a long-term business perspective (and wider cultural perspective) it's terrible.
Google Book Search Lawsuit Settled, Fair Use Questions Remain ... (Sherwan Siy, Public Knowledge)
But while the legal landscape isn't altered too much by the settlement, the practical landscape could be. Rightsholders and other potential plaintiffs might view this settlement as the model for all future relationships with digitization efforts--if Google pays for digitizing, why shouldn't everyone else? Such a landscape might make a plaintiff more likely to sue, although the results in court, ideally, shouldn't differ, with or without this settlement in place.
Boondoggle in Google Rights Win? (Warning, Rant) (Erik Sherman, Erik Sherman's WriterBiz)
Going forward, people will buy books they want online and libraries will pay for access. Who gets 37 percent of the revenue? Google. Plus, there's advertising revenue and Google gets the same percentage of that. So for $125 million, it's probably nailed down many, many times more future revenue. This will turn out to be a pretty cheap business acquisition for them.
Author's Guild Settlement Insta-Blogging (James Grimmelmann, The Laboratorium)
Read more…The issue is that this is a class-action settlement requiring judicial approval to bind all authors. It's practically impossible for anyone else to take advantage of Google's terms without filing suit to obtain a similar class-binding order. Individual license negotiation -- the route that Google considered and rejected when it started the project -- is utterly infeasible. Since voluntary negotiation can't produce the result one needs to do comprehensive indexing, there's still no market for it, and this settlement therefore shouldn't prejudice future fair use claims by search engines.
Libraries Embrace Urban Lit
Peter Brantley
October 23, 2008
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Great story in the New York Times on the embrace of urban lit by the Queens Public Library, and others. By the way: most of the young, and many of the old, librarians that i know are not ... ur ... prim:
It's not the kind of literary fare usually associated with the prim image of librarians. But public libraries from Queens, the highest-circulation library system in the country, to York County in central Pennsylvania, are embracing urban fiction as an exciting, if sometimes controversial, way to draw new people into reading rooms, spread literacy and reflect and explore the interests and concerns of the public they serve.
Urban fiction's journey from street vendors to library shelves and six-figure book deals is a case of culture bubbling from the bottom up. That is especially true in New York, where the genre, like hip-hop music, was developed by, for and about people in southeast Queens and other mostly black neighborhoods that have struggled with drugs, crime and economic stagnation.
A Plea for Passion in Museums
Peter Brantley
September 30, 2008
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This is a great post about passion for when we talk about our profession, about what we are all trying to do, whether we are librarians, technologists, publishers, or work in museums. It speaks to why libraries and museums often feel "dead." From Museum 2.0:
Museums shy away from presenting passionate views. It's ironic that we expect visitors to fall in love with our artifacts and exhibitions without ever presenting Bela-like models for that kind of passion. I think there are many visitors who wander into museums the same way they'd wander into a foreign sporting event -- they don't know what's going on, why people care, and most importantly, why they should care. At a sporting event, there are little Belas everywhere yelling at refs and hooting with glee. By following the cheering, newcomers can start to understand what parts of the game are most valued, and get a window into the deep love some fans show for the sport.
Museums don't have a cheering section. As visitors walk through galleries, it's easy to wonder: where does this stuff come from? Why is it here? Who cares? Museums do a decent job addressing the first two questions, but we rarely tackle the third. The use of an "objective" authoritative voice makes it hard for visitors to assign value or significance to items with which they don't already have a connection.
News Roundup: Customizable Magazine Service Launches, French E-Reader Includes Subscriptions, Library Tags Online-Offline Recommendations
Mac Slocum
September 19, 2008
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Maghound Customizable Magazine Service Launches
Maghound, a customizable magazine service from Time Inc., is now available. From Folio:
The membership pricing is tiered-- three titles for $4.95 a month, five titles for $7.95, seven titles for $9.95, and $1 per title for eight titles or more. Memberships can be entirely managed online, as well as by email and phone, from changing magazine title selections to updating personal information and placing magazine delivery on hold for a temporary period. (Continue reading)
France Telecom E-Reader Includes Subscriptions
France Telecom's Read & Go trial service bundles e-reader hardware with a subscription to mobile content. From BusinessWeek:
The trial of the prototype will wrap up this month, and by 2009, France Telecom aims to start distributing the Read & Go in conjunction with a subscription-based news service of the same name. For a monthly charge similar to a mobile service plan, customers will receive an over-the-air stream of aggregated content from a wide assortment of information sources. Alongside the articles will be ads that help defray the cost of the service. (Continue reading)
Library Uses Tags to Link Online-Offline Recommendations
LibraryTechNZ mentions an interesting engagement of a European library with its community, something that bookstores could also do:
The library at the Hague in the Netherlands has introduced a simple form of tagging in real life. They now have two returns drop-boxes. One is for all items, and the other is for amazing books. Staff take the 'amazing' books and put them in the 'amazing books' display for visitors to browse. But they also tag them 'amazing' in the Library's collection database.
Rethinking Libraries and Museums as "Living" Structures
Mac Slocum
July 23, 2008
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The Living Library project flips the reader-book dynamic on its head by allowing library patrons to "check out" human beings, and then engage in a civil dialogue. Nina Simon from Museum 2.0 extends the Living Library structure to a reimagining of museums:
How could visitors' stereotypes about museum behavior and the kinds of activities available in museums be exploited to provide a radically different experience? In the same way the Living Library is organized around the frame of librarians, catalogues, books, and the action of checking things out, a theoretical Living Museum could be organized around exhibits, artifacts, docents, and the action of looking at things or moving through spaces. Imagine a museum in which Artifacts of a war are veterans, family members, and former enemy combatants. Or an exhibit on immigration in which you could check out Legal and Alien Artifacts for discussion based on labels identifying their provenance and status. A museum tour in which a docent "tours" you to a variety of volunteer artists who talk about how they create their work.
News Roundup: Foldable E-Reader Coming Soon, New "Libraries" Bring New Privacy Issues, Analyst: Digital Change Targets TV and Film
Mac Slocum
July 11, 2008
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Foldable E-Reader Launching in Europe This Fall, U.S. in '09
The New York Times takes a look at the Readius foldable e-reader:
... the Readius, designed mainly for reading books, magazines, newspapers and mail, is the size of a standard cellphone. Flip it open, though, and a screen tucked within the housing opens to a 5-inch diagonal display. The screen looks just like a liquid crystal display, but can bend so flexibly that it can wrap around a finger. (Continue reading)
New "Libraries" Bring New Privacy Implications
As Google, Amazon and others become de facto digital libraries -- and lawsuits emerge -- Jeff Jarvis wonders what this means for users' privacy. From BuzzMachine:
Any site with content -- Google, Amazon, a newspaper, a blog, an ISP -- is now the moral equivalent of a library or bookstore, two institutions that try hard not to hand over information on what content we seek and consume arguing that that would violate our First Amendment rights. The controversy in the telco immunity legislation is that those searches were made without warrants. In this case [Viacom/YouTube], there is a warrant. When I ran sites, we got subpoenas all the time and handed over IP addresses when ordered; that was company policy. I always found it troubling and as a result ordered that we would change our data retention policy and get rid of IP addresses as soon as possible. Should Google and other sites erase IPs and rely only on cookies without personally identifiable information?
Analyst: Digital Disruption Has TV and Film in Crosshairs
In the wake of Lehman analyst Anthony DiClemente downgrading a wide swath of the entertainment industry, paidContent.org provides some blunt analysis:
Boiled down, the core argument is basically: You saw what happened to the music industry and the dramatic fall-off in CD prices. You've seen what's happened to the broadcast TV and newspaper industries. Now it's time for it to happen to TV and filmed entertainment. Hopes that digital revenue might somehow make up for lost physical sales are misguided, he [DiClemente] says, and again, you just have to look back at the music industry. (Continue reading)
New "Libraries" Bring New Privacy Implications
Peter Brantley
July 9, 2008
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As Google, Amazon and others become de facto digital libraries -- and lawsuits emerge -- Jeff Jarvis wonders what this means for users' privacy. From BuzzMachine:
Any site with content -- Google, Amazon, a newspaper, a blog, an ISP -- is now the moral equivalent of a library or bookstore, two institutions that try hard not to hand over information on what content we seek and consume arguing that that would violate our First Amendment rights. The controversy in the telco immunity legislation is that those searches were made without warrants. In this case [Viacom/YouTube], there is a warrant. When I ran sites, we got subpoenas all the time and handed over IP addresses when ordered; that was company policy. I always found it troubling and as a result ordered that we would change our data retention policy and get rid of IP addresses as soon as possible. Should Google and other sites erase IPs and rely only on cookies without personally identifiable information?
ALA 2008: Librarians and Patrons Want More Openness
Liza Daly
July 9, 2008
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At this year's American Library Association (ALA) conference in Anaheim, Calif., one theme emerged in talk after talk: librarians and the readers they serve demand more flexibility, transparency and openness in publishers' offerings. This affects not just digital-only reference works, but the book acquisition via library catalogs and standalone ebooks.
Reference publishing and resource discovery -- Reference publishers invest time and money in bespoke search interfaces for advanced users, but are users finding them? In the ALA panel "The Future of Electronic Reference Publishing," librarians repeatedly commented that multiple reference sources are confusing to users, and that resources must also be discoverable via Google and the library's own digital catalog.
If users do go directly to an individual resource or platform, the search interface should behave "like Google." Although the panel of major reference publishers did state that they are converging on Google's query language, many legacy systems remain that would be economically infeasible to re-tool.
Library catalogs and systems -- The need for more transparent, network-based services applies to the library catalog as well. In the marathon session, "The Ultimate Debate on the Future of the Library Catalog," speakers identified a critical need for geo-based services and APIs for finding what's in my local library -- now. Once a book is located I should be only a few clicks away from reserving it or even ordering it for delivery to my home.
That dream is still far off -- even with a service like WorldCat it's not currently possible for me to find and reserve a book at my local library. The closest offering presented on WorldCat is Harvard University's library, which is not about to lend to the likes of me. The problem is even worse for rural libraries. As for my local library -- I love books and this post is the first time it even occurred to me to visit their site. I'm not alone in that.
Ebooks -- This is a transitional time in publishing, and while many patrons still prefer print, an increasing number are asking for electronic books, especially in university libraries. Students and academics emphatically reject DRM and restrictions on usage, but many ebooks sold to libraries have technical barriers to printing, cut-and-paste and downloading.
Licensing and subscription costs are also a concern for libraries. Ebooks may be re-priced or re-bundled, challenging the basic assumption that once a library buys a title, it owns the book indefinitely. Librarians want assurances that the products they purchase are either available perpetually, or at least have clearly-stated licensing terms that do not change without notice.
The ability to safely and permanently archive electronic books has been a long-time concern of some librarians, but the floods in New Orleans and Iowa have changed some minds. Off-site electronic archiving would save at least some resources, especially for very small or rural libraries can't afford state-of-art preservation facilities.
What OpenID Can Do for Academic Publishers
Liza Daly
May 29, 2008
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OpenID is a free, decentralized system for managing your identity online. What does that mean? It's easy to explain by example.
Right now you probably have dozens of accounts on different Web sites. It's likely that you use the same (or similar) user names and passwords on all of them. OpenID solves the problem of creating nearly-identical accounts on different services, and also allows you to control how much personal information you provide to each service that asks for your OpenID.
What makes OpenID interesting in the publishing community is that it distinguishes between two concepts that are often conflated:
- Identity: Who am I?
- Authentication: What do I have access to?
Traditional user name and password schemes are used for both purposes, but they are actually quite different.
Identity only -- When I shop at Amazon.com (assuming I'm not boycotting it), I only need to provide my identity. I don't need any special permission to access Amazon's search and browse features. What I do want to protect are my account information and shopping cart, but arguably those belong to me, not Amazon.
Identity and authentication -- When I want to post to the TOC blog, I need to provide both types of credentials: identity, so the blog software can put my name under my post, but also authentication to prove that I'm a registered contributor. If you write a comment to this post, you'll only be asked to provide identity.
Authentication only -- The third case -- authentication without identity -- is common in subscription-based journals and research material. I can go to the Boston Public Library, sit at a terminal, and get access to hundreds of online resources in the deep web that aren't available to the general public. The library has paid for the right to access the resources, but those sites only need to know that I'm authenticated through an institutional subscription, not who I am as an individual. This is the correct default behavior, and it's admirable that librarians fight hard on behalf of patrons to explicitly protect users' identities.
This leaves academic and journal publishers without an obvious way to offer their users some of the benefits of identity-based systems: bookmarking, tagging, annotating, and sharing. One solution is to build another layer of access control: first I authenticate, either by using a library terminal or entering my library card number, and then I identify myself with yet another user name and password. Only then do I get the ability to save searches, bookmark documents and possibly share those with other authenticated users of the resource.
Publishers could instead use OpenID to handle identity management in these products. Compared with building such a system from scratch, OpenID is inexpensive and is already fully-implemented in many programming languages.
Users benefit in several ways: they don't have to create a new account and remember another set of credentials, and now they have new options for personalizing their research experience. It also opens up the possibility of tying together saved resources across multiple products owned by different publishers, similar to some types of citation management software.
Currently, signing up and using OpenID can be a bit confusing for novices, but the user experience is expected to improve. In the near future it's likely to be largely opaque to end-users, who will only need to know that their identity is managed by a source they already trust.
One last point that's relevant to library users: an OpenID account can still provide anonymity. There's no requirement or guarantee that my OpenID account name has anything to do with my legal name. It's likely that many users will have multiple OpenIDs in the same way that people use throwaway email accounts when registering on Web sites. However, the onus is still on the end-user to be careful where and how they distribute their personal information.
Internet Archive Wins Push-Back Fight with U.S. Government
Peter Brantley
May 8, 2008
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The Internet Archive has successfully pushed back against a federal national security letter (NSL) request for Archive member records. Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive co-founder, director and digital librarian, discussed the NSL process and outcome with the San Francisco Chronicle:
Kahle ... was appalled when his volunteer lawyers told him in November that the FBI was demanding records of all communications with one of his patrons as part of an investigation of "international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."
The FBI document, called a national security letter, told Kahle he could be prosecuted if he discussed the subject with anyone but his lawyers, and allowed him to speak with his attorneys only in person. Kahle said his Internet Archive, which has 500,000 card-holders, doesn't even keep the records the FBI was seeking.
He was allowed to speak publicly Wednesday [5/7/08] under a rare settlement in which the FBI agreed to withdraw its letter and lift the gag order. That should show other librarians, and members of the public who receive any of the nearly 50,000 national security letters the government issues each year, that "you can push back on these," Kahle said.
A Glimpse into Google's Book Scanning
Mac Slocum
April 25, 2008
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Google doesn't divulge specifics about its proprietary book scanning set-up, but the Associated Press offers a brief look into the manual scanning process used for old/fragile titles:
... the temperature is always in the 60s ... Each technician has a slightly angled table with a flexible middle that cradles books and holds them still while two overhead cameras photograph the pages. ... Once the images reach the computer, the women [featured in the AP story] use the book scanning software Omniscan from Germany's Zeutschel GmbH to clean them up. A final click of the mouse sends each digitized book to Google for optical character recognition processing, which makes the text searchable. Google then returns a copy of the images and data to the library and posts another to the Web.
(Via Publishers Weekly)
Does Skipping Publishers Mean Skipping Libraries?
Andrew Savikas
March 31, 2008
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When I speak to an audience of publishers, I use Getting Real as an important example of how popular bloggers who want to publish can easily skip publishers all together. 30,000 copies of a self-published PDF @ $19 (with no incremental unit cost) implies some enviable margins.
Tim Spalding over at LibraryThing brings up an unintended but important consequence of skipping publishers, especially when the resulting book becomes culturally important: right now it's also skipping libraries:
OCLC's WorldCat records exactly three copies—MIT, California Polytechnic and the University of Nebraska. That's three copies of one of the top tech books of the 00's in most of the US libraries that matter. The Library of Congress? New York Public? Harvard? None of them. For comparison, WorldCat contains 619 copies of Solitary sex : a cultural history of masturbation.
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