Other things and overall thoughts

And so, I reach the end of my time in Chicago and at ALA. The conference is pretty much done, and I'm flying home tomorrow. It's been a great experience, and as well as the thought-provoking sessions I attended, I got to meet a lot of people and spend plenty of time poking around the exhibits, which seemed to cover not only all the major things but anything and everything even vaguely related to libraries. I was a bit like a kid in a candy store (or a Jane in a bookstore) at times in the exhibition hall, particularly when I was in the publishers' section - all those pretty pretty books - but there were also plenty of potentially interesting and useful things I found out about. It was one of those places though where I really wished for an endless supply of money so that I might actually be able to take some of the shiny stuff home with me, but it's always nice to window-shop! I've also really enjoyed being in Chicago, my second visit to the city, and the feeling of being part of something with a whole lot of other people - the camaraderie in the queues, keeping up with the chatter (and the snark) on Twitter (see #ala2009 and #totebag), the more social events both formal and informal. ALA was as big and busy as I had been warned it was, but I always found it good-natured and inclusive. Maybe that was because I'm a wide-eyed newbie and only went to things that looked interesting (plus I got my book signed by Neil Gaiman and am still coming down off the high from that), but in any case I'm very thankful to OULS for funding me to come.

My, those novels are certainly graphic!: Libraries, comic books and censorship

I should admit right at the start, I went to this session primarily because Neil Gaiman was one of the panellists. He is quite simply one of my literary heroes, and frankly I'd listen to him talk about accountancy and be enthralled, so I couldn't miss out on the opportunity. I do have a strong interest in freedom of speech and freedom of information though, and strongly admire the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, who were sponsoring the panel. The panel consisted of Charles Brownstein, the Director of the CBLDF, Neil Gaiman and two other comics authors - Terry Moore and Craig Thompson. They all spoke about the current state of play with graphic novels, how after so many years they have achieved a kind of respectability and are now taken seriously and routinely stocked by libraries for example, but that in achieving this the battle has now moved on to them needing to justify themselves in terms of content. The CBLDF exists to fight those battles for those who make, publish and sell comics, and, worryingly for librarians, now for those who buy, own and read them, in the light of the current case of a man who has been prosecuted under obscenity laws for owning some Japanese manga. Along the way there was some interesting discussion about the relationship between creator and reader in comics as opposed to prose (or film) - in prose, the creator "gives the reader the raw code" for them to construct the image, whereas with comics the reader is given a series of snapshots and asked to fill in the blanks, create the story as much as the image. It was argued that perhaps this makes some people feel more uncomfortable with controversial material, as there is a degree of complicity. The static, visual nature of them also contributes, as anything potentially objectionable is more obvious - this is what gives comics their power as a storytelling medium, but also lays them open to more of this kind of accusation. It was interesting to hear the three authors talk about their experiences with accusations of obscenity and censorship, the odd mix of pride and guilt that their work has caused such a fuss, and the reason why, if you believe in freedom of speech, sometimes you have to defend things you find distasteful.

Neil Gaiman says it so much better.

The secrecy hangover

Tom Blanton, the Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, gave a talk about the US government's penchant for secrecy, particularly in recent years with the Bush administration and how things might be changing under President Obama. His talk was at times entertaining, alarming, hopeful and depressing, but always eye-opening. He began by pointing out that the issue of government secrecy is particularly timely at the moment, with the front-page story of the New York Times this morning being about Dick Cheney concealing the CIA programme from Congress, but swiftly moved on to emphasise that government secrecy did not begin post-9/11 and that the struggle against it has been going on a lot longer than that. The NSA has been fighting this battle since the 1980s, when the FBI Library Awareness Program came out - from the 1960s to the 1980s, the FBI wanted librarians to keep an eye out for people with foreign-sounding names or accents, and actually opened files on librarians who complained. They have gone on to fight battles about White House emails (at which point we were shown statistics on the explosion in quantity from some 200,000 emails during the Reagan administration to 220 million for George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is apparently archiving every Blackberry message too), the National Security letters (143,000 letters were sent to librarians between 2003 and 2005, and only one terrorism-related conviction resulted), among other things. He showed us graphs depicting classification and declassification over the last 20-30 years (secrecy was much less under the Clinton administration, but increased dramatically under Bush) and numerous examples of documents that have had their classifications changed, or different parts blacked out at different times - in many cases resulting in the absurd situation that by comparing the versions released at different times you can reconstruct almost the complete document. His main argument was that decisions about the level of secrecy are in many cases (arguably most cases) arbitrary and depend more on fashions in bureaucracy or desire to prevent embarrassment than actual need for secrecy. This results in a huge amount of overclassification and a culture of secrecy that can actually put people in more danger than we would be if things were more open. The most shocking example of this was the line highlighted in the 9/11 commission report stating that the attacks would most likely not have gone ahead if there had been more publicity about the arrest of Moussaoui in August 2001. Openness and sharing of information both keeps us safer and makes problems easier to fix.

This main point made, Tom Blanton moved on to discuss the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy in more detail, with numerous examples relating to Iraq and the War on Terror. Unsurprisingly, he was damning in his criticism, arguing that there was a 'testosterone attack' in the White House after 9/11, and that in situation after situation, a small group of very powerful people made decisions and kept them secret, and it is only just now starting to come out. President Obama was elected on a platform of transparency - "sunlight is the best disinfectant" - but isn't quite living up to his own ideals as yet, releasing some information but by no means all. However, change is slow, and still almost half of the top officials in the administration have not yet been appointed, so an awful lot of people in government are still operating under old assumptions - perhaps therefore this is a hopeful sign that eventually things will improve further, but on the other hand, inevitably "the longer they are in government, the more they will have to hide", even if only out of embarrassment. The realist has to admit that governments will always want to keep things secret to a greater or lesser extent, and that it is much easier to talk about openness when you're not in power. But at least if you have an administration whose instinct is that you should be as open as possible, combined with people like Tom Blanton and the NSA and all the other people in government who have exposed things in the past, you have a chance that the unnecessary secrecy will be kept to a minimum, and we will all be safer as a result.

This was a fascinating and informative session, resonating with both my belief in freedom of information (as Tom Blanton pointed out, the raison d'etre of librarians) and my interest in American politics, and is definitely one of the highlights of the conference so far.

Unleashing the undigitized: promoting and accessing traditional historical resources in the age of Google

This session was designed to highlight the fact that despite the enormous amount of primary source material being digitized and made available online, either for free or via subscription, it is still just a drop in the ocean and historians still need to access material in print and microform. However, 'digital natives' increasingly rely solely on what they can find on the web and so there is a danger that a huge amount of valuable source material is being overlooked by students - "if it isn't digitised, it doesn't exist". A representative from ProQuest spoke about what ProQuest is doing to try to bridge the gap between print/microform and online materials - developing online finding aids to non-digitised material, and tools such as 'digital microfilm', which digitises microfilm in a basic way, virtually mimicking the way that microfilm is read, browsing, scrolling and printing rather than fully searchable text. He also gave us some interesting statistics from the realm of historical newspapers to show just how small a percentage of this material has actually been digitised. After some ten years of digitisation projects by various organisations, some 108 million pages have been digitised, which sounds like a lot until you realise how many pages exist in print - the British Library at Collindale has at least 750 million pages, and the Library of Congress some 3 billion!

A librarian and an archivist then spoke about the ways in which they have tried to teach students how to use print and microform primary sources and overcome the instinct not to look beyond Google. They had a large number of useful suggestions about practical ways to teach this kind of information literacy (letting students loose with archival material to give them a taste for the real thing), and about what librarians need to make sure they do - making sure that you really know your collection, especially if print resources are being moved to closed stacks/offsite storage, so that we don't just rely on the web ourselves. A big theme from all three speakers was about making sure that digital resources point to non-digital ones - including them in catalogues, websites, bibliographic databases etc - so that you lead people to them from the digital environment. The other major theme, not unusually for discussions of user education, was the need to get academics on board and realise how librarians can help both them and their students. Unfortunately none of this is really new, and the speakers didn't have any suggestion as to how we can actually overcome the reluctance of both students and academics to seek and accept help from libarians, beyond just 'keep plugging away' - likening it to Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the hill. Not very comforting but I guess not surprising either. I think it's one of the biggest problems librarians have in general, that we feel that we can offer far more than our users feel we can. All the majority of library users really want is to be able to access the resources they want quickly and easily and for us to leave them alone while they do it! Which means that librarians spend an awful lot of time and effort trying to find ways to both justify our existence beyond that and to convince users that they do want more, if only they'd listen to us and let us show them.

That's quite a depressing thought! For me, the most useful thing about this session was the reminder that we shouldn't be complacent in thinking everything's online now, and even though this is something I come up against frequently back at the VHL, I will make sure to keep it in mind.

Science fiction and fantasy: uncovering the modern world or information, society and technology through metaphor and imagination

I finished the day by indulging myself at the science fiction and fantasy writers' panel (which was a particularly great decision as we got free books!). I am a big sci-fi/fantasy fan - it is my genre of choice and always has been. The panel of five writers (Robert Charles Wilson, Ken Scholes, Margaret Weis, John Brown and Eric Flint) each spoke about what sci-fi/fantasy means to them - the panel didn't quite live up to its grandiose title, as the authors interpretations of it were rather loose, but they were all interesting and entertaining and the session had a real community feel to it as always happens when you get a group of sci-fi/fantasy fans together - here there was a genuine and personal common interest, as opposed to a professional one, fans not professionals.

Some of the notable points made from the varying talks were:

• Writing science fiction makes you a philosopher, as it's speculative by its very nature. (Robert Charles Wilson)
• The persistence of the book and the power of knowledge is a recurring theme in sci-fi/fantasy. (Robert Charles Wilson)
• Sci-fi shows us somewhere to go, even if we may not necessarily want to go there. (Ken Scholes)
• Sci-fi/fantasy is not escapist - that's a shallow perception. It's a way of sugaring the pill, but SFF authors write about people and issues as much as any other genre author. (Margaret Weis)
• Fiction is a drug, and sci-fi/fantasy is a particularly powerful gateway drug to literacy for young people. According to a recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts, 34% of young people said they read sci-fi/fantasy, and according to sales stats and circulation data, this is the genre that is growing the most. (John Brown)
• Sci-fi/fantasy authors/readers feel compelled to justify themselves in the face of a hostile literary establishment, which is a silly notion based on the artificial and recent idea that stories about ordinary people succeeding in extraordinary situations and having happy endings are somehow not literary. Unless they're classics. (Eric Flint).

The authors were all pretty much preaching to the converted, and there was nothing mentioned that I didn't already know, but being a fan myself I thoroughly enjoyed it!

Life after 2.0

This panel featured some of the big names in the library 2.0 movement discussing the state of play with web 2.0 and libraries now that we are several years into it and the first flush of excitement has died down. First of all, Meredith Farkas spoke about some of the reasons that web 2.0 services fail to live up to their promise - doing things because everyone else is or because it's the new cool thing, assuming that we know better than our readers what they need and not taking into account whether they actually use any of these services themselves, not taking into account the cost in terms of time and effort of apparently free tech, losing interest and letting things fall by the wayside. None of these were unsurprising, but it reiterated the point that web 2.0 services are not cosmetic, but tools that help us provide real services. As with any other service, librarians need to think about what they're doing, use tools that provide tangible benefits, have a clear purpose for any new service, invest in terms of time and effort to maintain and monitor, and listen to our users about what they are doing and what they want.

Secondly, Lori Bell spoke about Second Life, and again what she said was not anything surprising. Second Life has always had a small number of devotees, but even they acknowledge that it isn't for everyone - Lori Bell said this right up-front at the start of her talk! I agree with her that this is the way that the internet is going to go eventually, virtual worlds and 3D websites, but it isn't there yet and is still some way off, in my opinion. I applaud the Second Life librarians for embracing it and exploring the possibilities (so the rest of us don't have to!), but as far as the majority is concerned, I think we should just keep a weather eye on it and wait for the next generation of such sites to develop and become practical.

Michelle Springer from the Library of Congress then spoke about what the Library of Congress has been doing with web 2.0 services, and I think they're really a model of what can be done and how. They are on Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, iTunesU and now Facebook, as well as bringing in web 2.0 features to their own site, and are doing it all with a real sense of purpose and in a really considered manner. Expanding into external sites is a big decision for them as they often have to negotiate amendments to the terms and conditions so that they can use them as a government agency - eg arranging to keep adverts and promoted videos off their YouTube page. Naturally it helps that they have the legal weight to do this and also have such fantastic resources that many people are really interested in. Michelle spent some time talking about the Flickr page and the way that their involvement there has affected both Flickr (setting up the Commons to bring in other organisations in the same way) and their own site (incorporating information obtained via the comments on their photos in their catalogue records). This is where them being such a well-known organisation really helps - they have no shortage of interested users willing to comment and participate, so they don't seem to have encountered the problem so many other libraries have of not getting their users to get involved. I've watched the Library of Congress's ventures in this arena with a lot of interest ever since they started with Flickr, both as someone interested in libraries' use of web 2.0 and as a US studies librarian, and continue to be very impressed with what they are doing. I think the Bodleian could take a huge amount of inspiration from them in this area!

Finally, Helene Blowers, creator of the 23 Things Learning 2.0 programme, wrapped up the session with a talk about what we've learned over the past few years of library 2.0. She talked about the shift from web 2.0 to social media, following a quote from Clay Shirky that "things don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring". We are now in the socially interesting page, where we've reached the tipping point and everybody's using a lot of these things, or at the very least aware of them. But that presents its own danger, as businesses etc jump on them as marketing tools and undermine the very essence of web 2.0 as collaborative - just viewing Facebook and Twitter etc as other channels to communicate their message and control. Helene therefore reiterated the importance of the ideals of web 2.0 - empowering users, letting go of the conversation, listening not telling, engaging etc. However it seems to me that unfortunately this is not what actually works, and I don't think web 2.0 has ever lived up to this promise. She pointed out that some are arguing web 2.0 is actually about going back to the basics of what the web was originally intending to be, and I think this is true, but I also think that the cyclical nature works both ways - the web, both 1.0 and 2.0, has tremendous potential to bring people together, to be social, but in actual fact ends up being used more as just more media. I don't know if that cycle will ever be broken, but I think the difference is that as technology develops it does become easier to live up to the ideal a bit more - web 2.0 tools allow for so much more interation and collaboration than the old static HTML pages, so perhaps we're getting there, but no matter how many evangelists advocate the idealistic state of mind, the realities of society and business provide big stumbling blocks to living up to that potential fully.

Google Book Search settlement

I'd heard a lot about the Google Book Search settlement before coming here, but not really looked into it in much depth, so I was interested to attend this session exploring the current state of play and how it is likely to affect not only libraries, but the wider world of books, access to information, and copyright law. The speakers at this session included a representative from Google and several librarians who have examined the settlement and its implications in detail. We were given a brief run down of what the settlement means, both its intentions and the potential consequences, both good and bad, and it was clear (as I already knew) that this is a highly controversial area.

The ALA has already commented on the settlement, but it is still being looked at by a lot of different organisations, including the Department of Justice, before more hearings due in October. So far, the University of Michigan and two other existing Google partner libraries have modified their agreements with Google in order to take advantage of the new model. The settlement basically gives Google the right to provide and charge for access to the full-text of in-copyright material, unless the copyright holders opt-out. In-print material will be scanned and indexed but not made available unless the rights-holders authorise it. Out-of-print (but still copyright) material will be made available via different levels of access - preview (as at the moment), or purchased either individually or institutionally. The pricing model will be negotiated with the rights-holders - the Book Rights Registry, authors and publishers - but libraries will be able to appeal if they feel the pricing is unfair (it is intended as compensation for rights-holders, not as profit), and libraries that provide material for scanning will get their own digital copies of the books in their collections. The settlement only applies to US law and material copyrighted in the US, but as with everything on the internet, the implications are international, and as Google is a global company so it can be seen as a sign of the way things may go elsewhere.

The librarian-speakers ranged from very positive to highly critical of the settlement. All agreed that Google's intentions are for the best, and that their goal of digitising and making available such a vast amount of material is admirable. The ideal of anyone anywhere in the world being able to read pretty much anything ever published instantly online is indisputably a fantastic one. Libraries have attempted mass digitisation themselves but without much success, so having Google come along with the money and the resources to do it can be seen as a gift. However there are some serious concerns that need taking into consideration, and cast doubt on whether this particular settlement is going to be a good thing for libraries, for the general public, and for information freedom. I haven't looked into this in much detail myself, so the below is a summary of arguments made by the panellists, and I think I need to read more in order to make up my mind as to how much of a problem these things are.

• Librarians and readers are not being represented in the pricing negotiations, which are closed for Google, the Book Rights Registry and representatives of authors and publishers. Will the right to appeal be sufficient, or will this mean that what's best for readers will lose out to what's best for copyight holders? The settlement as is gives the balance of power to the copyright holders in the decisions about pricing, security and the punishment for perceived infringement, and will allow them to sue libraries if they think this is happening.
• The public access model (1 terminal per library) is unlikely to be sufficient for most libraries, so all libraries will end up having to subscribe. Google will have a virtual monopoly over the digital version of the vast majority of content produced during the 20th century - as one of the panelists claimed, this makes them the guardians of the culture of that whole time. Google might have a 'do no evil' policy now, and their intentions might be good, but we have no guarantee that will always be the case. It could be like the power that the top journal publishers now have, with their inflated prices that libraries have no choice but to pay, but even worse.
• There are severe restrictions on what can be done with content (printing etc) in order to protect copyright, but this will result in a narrowing of the definition of fair use and on what is considered the public domain. Google has always argued for a wide definition of what can be considered fair use (it's how they justified what they were doing with the preview function in the first place), but they will not need to rely on this so much following the settlement as their rights have been codified, and it may well be easier to assume things are protected than open.
• The restrictions intended to protect the copyright have big implications for privacy. In order to have and enforce these, an enormous amount of data will be collected about the user - what they are reading, how long for, what they print etc - and there is currently no provision in the settlement to make sure this data is protected.
• One of the panellists pointed out that there are problems from a legal point of view with the settlement - "bad law, even when it serves a good purpose, is problematic". The agreement is unusual because it ended up not being a compromise, as such, and actually barely concentrates on the alleged copyright infringement that started it all. Both parties, Google and the copyright holders, have a financial interest in the outcome that they got, even though Google claims not to have financial intentions.
• The all-encompassing nature of the agreement means that a huge number of non-US citizens who are affected by it due to having copyright interests in the US. International copyright treaties are supposed to ensure that governments cannot place sweeping conditions on copyright, which is just what the settlement does. It is also problematic that people actively have to opt-out, otherwise the agreement is a de facto alteration of their rights, handing a licence to Google.
• Are Google's aims and librarians' aims really compatible? We both want to improve access to information, but how do Google see libraries in this? Are we in fact viewed as obstacles to their stated goal of universal access to information?

I don't know exactly where I stand on this. I think it's clear that this is a huge deal, and sets a massive precedent. I agree with all those who say that despite everything they think Google has their heart in the right place, and genuinely want to expand access and do a good thing. But unfortunately it is not just about Google as currently exists, as it sets a legal precedent, particularly in the realm of the balance between rights-holders and users when it comes to copyright. And this is what makes me most uneasy. I hope that Google can continue to fight for freedom of information and a loose, user-focused definition of fair use, so that as much content as possible can be available freely and unrestrictedly. But if many of the concerns I heard this morning turn out to be the case, then it seems to me to run contrary to what Google has always been about, and becomes a way of protecting copyright-holders to the detriment of users.

Gregory Maguire: playing with stolen property

First up this morning was the author Gregory Maguire, speaking for an hour on 'playing with stolen property'. In case anyone doesn't know, he is the author of Wicked and specialises in reworking traditional stories with a twist. Anyone who knows me will know that I love books that do this - in fact my dissertation was on reworkings of myth in children's literature, so this talk ticked all my boxes. He used an anecdote about a childhood game (playing The Wizard of Oz but with added Captain Hook, Peter Pan and Tinkerbell) to show how childhood stories are a universal language that we can all relate to, and that this is why he uses such material in his books - it's a way of relating to as many people as possible. This is exactly the point I made in my dissertation, although I would argue that in a limited way - obviously the examples he gave and uses are culture-specific and wouldn't necessarily apply to someone from another time and place. But if you take it that step further and talk about the universality of the myths, stories and archetypes that underpin those very same childhood stories, you get to the crux of it, that stories that rework others touch us on a deeper level, and tap into that shared part of our minds.

He went on to discuss two reworkings he's been working on of late - an appreciation of Maurice Sendak, where he puts words to many of Sendak's drawings (and pointing out that Sendak himself has always been a 'great larcenist'), and a reworking (incorporating a retelling) of Hans Christian Anderson's Little Match Girl, Matchless. He read us the start of this book, showing the illustrations, and talked a little about what he has brought to this new version of the story. He discussed how as time has gone on we have found the story harder and harder to bear, as we as a society have become more secular and have lost our appreciation of the transcendency that Anderson was trying to convey. So he has tried to find a fantasy in the story as passed down to us that he can use to attempt to restore that sense of transcendency.

It was an entertaining and thoughtful session, and a real treat at the start of what looked to be a long day!

Government Information: a topic for all librarians

The first session I attended was a forum for librarians from many areas and specialisations about government information - how and why we access it, what training and guidance we need and provide to our users, discussion of concerns and just what we mean when we talk about government information. It was being run by the Council on Legislation and GODORT (Government Documents Round Table) with the intention of helping them produce a report to take to ALA about the needs of all librarians in this area. Representatives had been invited from all the various ALA subgroups, and the forum was also attended by people from the Government Printing Office and all sorts of interested parties.

We were divided into groups to discuss the topic, which meant that everyone got a chance to contribute. Because there were people there from all sorts of libraries, with all sorts of users and all sorts of reasons for needing to access government information, the discussion was wide-ranging and it was good to hear such a variety of perspectives and, as ever, to discover that everyone faces the same issues. One of the main concerns that people expressed was about the increasingly ephemeral nature of a lot of government information - more and more is 'born digital' and is not being recorded, catalogued, archived and preserved. Documents and websites are liable to move and even disappear, and, quite aside from the difficulties that presents for librarians and researchers, there is a great worry about the amount of information that is being lost to posterity. The feeling is that this is mostly due to neglect on the part of the producers - they often don't have a long-term interest in their information, and aren't thinking about who else may be interested in it, either now or in the future. This also affects the findability of information - the producers often aren't bothered about cataloguing/metadata for the same reasons, but this renders an awful lot of potentially very useful information valueless as it cannot be found. This is the dark side of the digital revolution as far as this area is concerned, that even while the internet has brought an enormous amount of information to a wider audience through digitisation projects and the negating of geographical barriers, it poses a great threat to new information that never has a physical form. It is an issue that I had heard quite a bit about in the UK, and I know that the British Library is looking into how to overcome this, so it was interesting (if not surprising) to hear about the same problems for the US.