There was a recent article in the Library Journal about the dismissal of the head of the public library system in Lexington, Kentucky. Without much information, which is kind of the point of this article, it's hard to really take sides but there are two points that jump out at me when discussing something like this.

Firstly, the CEO makes some pretty strongly negative claims about the behaviour of the local newspaper and their role in all this. As I've said before, I've never been too impressed with most "professional" journalists. They seem more interested in selling papers than disseminating information. Honestly, if it comes down to a librarian's word versus a journalist's word, all else being held equal, I'd have to pick the side of the librarian, despite my obvious bias.

Also, one of the criticisms of the article and the CEO is that she was fired with no explanation. What on earth is that? What kind of open and transparent government runs things like that (rhetorical question, thank you)? I've always thought that very few, at least in an official sense and regarding important issues, decisions should be made without a specified and sufficient reason. Voting? You should have to write at least a couple paragraphs as to why you think this party or this candidate is better than the other(s). Government decisions? Whole reports could be provided explaining the reasoning and the consideration of other possibilities and options. Ethical beliefs? Well, its certainly got to include something more than, "it seems like the right thing to do." Without some clarification of our actions that will affect others to a meaningful degree, we're just animals (which is exactly what we are but nonetheless), which is not what we WANT to be. We seem to like to consider ourselves somewhat more advanced, somewhat more conscious, somewhat more enlightened. Setting aside any arguments as to whether we are or not, we should at least act like what we want to appear as.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on journalism? And should we really be held to account for our actions in some "literal" way?

[ From Lexington PL CEO Imhoff Fired; Threatens Suit, Criticizes Newspaper Coverage by Norman Oder at Library Journal ]

Labels: aboutEvents, aboutHumanNature, aboutInformation, aboutLibrarianship, aboutReason, aboutWork

 

The New York Times online has an interesting article about "Animal Farm" and "1984" being deleted from Kindle users after Amazon realized they did not have the right to have sold it in the first place. This is interesting in two ways, IMHO:

1. "Owning" something digital is not always clear cut: This is something that librarians have come to realize with the advent of online content. In the past, we have purchased journals and books comfortably knowing that whatever we bought we would have until it was destroyed beyond repair which, if care was taken, would be quite a long time. With electronic journals and books, ownership of content disappeared, to be replaced with something more like renting the works. We can purchase a whole run of a journal with back files and everything, often for not much less than the print would have cost, but if the distributor decides that something needs to be changed, anything from a typo to our access to it at all, we have very little control and sometimes no knowledge of it even. My suggestion: we should refuse to "buy" anything that we don't have actual control over. If it's digital, we need to factor in the cost of hosting it on our sites if we want to ensure future access at all.
2. Our concept of rights is confused: In this Amazon case, the reason for the deletions was that Amazon had mistakenly sold something they should not have sold. Do we really think we have the right to something just because we spent money on it? What if someone stole your TV, then sold it off the back of their truck to your neighbour? If you COULD get it back, wouldn't you think it was your RIGHT to have it back? Just because we haven't been able to return "stolen" merchandise to its rightful owner in the past, doesn't mean we shouldn't ever do so in the future. And they got their money back. No one lost anything (except the poor shmuck who lost his notes saved in the ebook - remember, keep control of your digital property). There are millions of copies of these books, some you can get for free, say, at your public library for example.

Both of these issues are summed up in a great quote from the article:

"I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased."

So either accept other's rights along with yours or hold on tighter to your stuff. Or maybe I'm wrong... What do you think?

[ From Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices by Brad Stone at NYTimes.com ]

Labels: aboutBooks, aboutEthics, aboutEvents, aboutInformation, aboutMoney, aboutTechnology

 

Library Journal has reported on a new deal between the University of Michigan and Amazon where hundreds of thousands of digitized public domain books will be made available through their print on demand business.

Sounds good. Hopefully UMich is getting tons of moolah for the deal. And it's good to see efforts made to support the interests of the long tail, those people looking for works otherwise out of print and therefore much more difficult to obtain. I only have two problems with this. One, I see nowhere in this article any mention of any efforts to make this huge pile of etexts available to or through other academic or public libraries. They said that a lot of them are already available through UMich's catalog and Google Book Search but that limits the potential discoverers to those at UMich (and maybe a bit of the outlying area) and those who actually know that Google Book Search exists (I'm always amazed that people don't even try there). Make it easy to link through or host the content elsewhere and make those works supposedly owned by the public available for use by the public.

My other problem is in regards to Roy Tennant's comment that this is a sign that print is not dead. Well, no it's not but this doesn't suggest that it's going to live any longer than we thought before. Print's got it's place but speaking for myself, if it's a choice between paying for something in print and getting it for free online, I'm taking the latter. Even if the fee is nominal. But I'm a geek, so... All this will do it delay print's demise for certain otherwise doomed genres because the majority of those searching for books will pay Amazon not knowing that it could be free somewhere else.

[ From Michigan Deal A New Twist on Access to Scanned Book Content at Library Journal 7/23/2009 ]

Labels: aboutBooks, aboutEvents, aboutInformation, aboutMoney, aboutReading

 

As of yesterday, Google has removed the BETA label from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and GTalk.

Wow. What a time to be alive... Where was I, at, uh, 8:02 am?!?! Asleep? Eating breakfast with the kids? Well, I didn't notice until Lifehacker told me yesterday when I checked my RSS feeds at around 10 am. And it didn't really sink in until tonight.

But it is somewhat of a big thing. On the Google blog entry about this, they talk about the issue of our new "world of rapid developmental cycles where products like Gmail continue to change indefinitely". The beta label could have suggested that these tools were not "perfected" yet, possibly meaning that something could go wrong at any moment. I know I thought about that recently when I noticed the beta sticker on Gmail a few weeks ago and mulled over what that meant. Should I go with something else? What else is there really? Does that word really mean that another free tool lacking the label would be any better? And there's always the issue of data back-up. Should I be doing that? Do I want to? Do I have the time? Is it even possible in all the tools I may want to do so for?

Although the removal of the beta label from these Google products is virtually meaningless directly, it makes a kind of sense to be done around now. The nature of these tools are not really changing - they will still be improved and changed as Google sees fit - but it was probably past due keeping it as a conspicuous issue in these tools in comparison with the other new things Google is and will be producing.

What do you think? Was it a good move? And what does it mean for them or for us users?

Labels: aboutEvents, aboutOnlineTools, aboutWeb2.0