Library Juice 7:26 - December 17, 2004
Contents:
1. Links...
2. Editing Embargo Lifted
3. On Google's Monetization of Libraries
4. Google-Watch appeals to the American Library Association
5. To the Bodleian Librarian
Quote for the week:
"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."
-Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
Homepage of the week: Karla Tonella
http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/webbuilder/karla/
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1. Links...
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Whoever set up a syndication of Library Juice on Livejournal, thanks!
http://www.livejournal.com/users/libraryjuice/
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PROGRESSIVE LIBRARIANSHIP IN A POSTMODERN WORLD
A prospective view from Australia
Jennifer Cram
http://www.alia.org.au/~jcram/progressive_librarianship.html[ cited by Jessamyn West in her presentation at ALIA ]
[ I stated in my essay on anarchist librarianship in the last issue
that Jessamyn was on her way to at a conference in Australia on
intellectual property. I was in error - she was at the Australian
Library and Information Association conference, where IP was just
one of many topics under discussion. ]-----
Libraries and national security
An Historical Review
by Joan Starr
First Monday, issue 9:12
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_12/starr/[ Edward Valauskas to First Monday announcement list ]
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Payment for Services Rendered
Presentation to the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies Nov.
8-9, 2002; East Los Angeles College; Panel "Cuba Today."
By Rhonda L. Neugebauer, Bibliographer, Latin American Studies
University of California, Riverside
http://www.cubalinda.com/English/Groups/RhondaNeugebauer.htm[ from Conservatorblog ]
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Finalists in the Duke Law Center for the Public Domain's
Arts Project Moving Image Contest
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/contest/finalists/[ from Sam Trosow to the SRRT list ]
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Using Libraries for Medieval Research
(Historical Research in the Modern Library)
Originally developed for a class in the Society for Creative Anachronism,
by Pani Jadwiga Zajaczkowa , Jennifer Heise
http://www.lehigh.edu/~jahb/jadwiga/libraries.html-----
The uncorrected transcript of Oral Evidence given by CILIP, the Society of
Chief Librarians, The Audit Commission and the Advisory Council on Libraries
is now available on the House of Commons Website (UK) at:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmcumeds/uc81-i/uc8101.htm[ Shiraz Durrani to the PLG list ]
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BUGMENOT.COM
If you hate when websites require you to register just read a short
article, you'll love this site. Bugmenot.com allows users to bypass
compulsory web registration by providing functioning logins and
passwords for over 40,000 sites:
http://www.bugmenot.com/[ Carrie McLaren to Stay Free! list subscribers ]
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Stuff Exchange - trade books
http://www.stuffex.net/index.cfm?action=books[ found surfing ]
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Freegans
http://freegan.info/[ sent to me by Cathy Cormier ]
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Links relating to the Google news are in the references at the end of
the related article in this issue.
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2. Editing Embargo Lifted
ALAWON: American Library Association Washington Office Newsline
Volume 13, Number 105
December 16, 2004In This Issue: EDITING EMBARGO LIFTED
The Washington Office has been monitoring the issue of U.S. Treasury
Department rules, through the Office of Foreign Assets Control, known as
OFAC, that prohibit transactions with the governments of Cuba, Iran, and
Sudan. In a ruling on Wednesday, 15 December, the Department said that
trade embargoes do not restrict publishing, so U.S. persons (citizens
and registered aliens) do not have to apply for a license if they wish
to edit or publish works by authors in Cuba, Iran, or Sudan. Violators
of the trade embargo face fines of up to $1-million and jail terms of as
much as 10 years. The new rule enables U.S. persons to freely engage in
most ordinary publishing activities with persons in Cuba, Iran and
Sudan, while maintaining restrictions on certain interactions with the
governments, government officials, and people acting on behalf of the
governments of those countries.Congress had exempted "information or informational materials" from
trade embargoes in 1988. Until Wednesday's ruling, however, OFAC had
exempted only informational materials that were "fully created" by
people in embargoed countries and that had not been substantially
altered, including by editing, in the United States. In order to edit
informational materials from authors in embargoed countries, U.S.
persons were required file requests for licenses.In September, a suit asking for an immediate injunction against
enforcement of the regulations was filed by the Association of American
Publishers' Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, the
Association of American University Presses, the PEN American Center, and
Arcade Publishing. The plaintiffs were joined by Shirin Ebadi, the
Iranian lawyer and human-rights activist who sought to publish her
memoirs in the United States.A copy of the rule submitted to the Federal Register
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/reports/office foreign.pdf----
Editor's note: as Mark Rosenzweig pointed out to listserv subscribers,
the embargo is still in effect for "representatives of foreign
governments," which includes most authors in countries with nationalized
systems of publication, such as Cuba.
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3. On Google's Monetization of Libraries
By Rory Litwin
Google's announcement Monday (1) of plans to digitize millions of books in
the collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, NYPL and
Oxford and to make them accessible through that ultra-simple search box is
causing a new outbreak of Google-fever, for which the cure is to remember
some of the principles of librarianship.Already, Lynn Neary on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" (Dec. 15th) has framed
any potential criticism of this development as "sentimental" attachment to
brick-and-mortar libraries, but it is not sentimentality that sees the
dark side of this development. (2) It is a rational concern for the
preservation of a number of the attributes of libraries that give them
their inestimable value in a society that aspires to democracy and to the
full development of human potential. Google's back-room deal with these
universities (which was not worked out in cooperation with the library
community though it has implications for libraries as an institution)
carries with it a host of problems about which librarians should think
carefully before cheering for this corporate giant in its grand plan to
assimilate the world's cultural heritage.Monetization
Google co-founder Larry Page is cited in an article that appeared in
Tuesday's Information World Review as being a "firm believer in academic
libraries being able to 'monetise' the information they hold." (3) Paul
Courant, provost at the University of Michigan, is quoted in the Chronicle
of Higher Education as saying the project is worth "hundreds of millions"
of dollars to his University alone. (4) Google obviously considers that
kind of money to be a good investment, which means they expect many
hundreds of millions in revenue from these collections, through
advertising in the near term and probably other means in the longer term.
Already the Google Print (TM) service, of which this deal is to be a part,
provides links to booksellers as well as to libraries. Though they have
not announced plans to offer the full text of copyrighted materials on a
pay-per-view basis, with fees turned over to copyright owners, it is a
technical possibility with the natural force of an economic vacuum in the
corporate context. Logically it would seem to be only a matter of time
before this mode of access becomes a reality, providing a channel for
bypassing both public-interest information policies and the librarian's
professional service. The fact that Google is putting libraries "on page
A1 above the fold" (in the front page NY Times article), as Barbara Fister
put it in an email to COLLIB-L, is not a victory for libraries if the real
meaning of this development is simply the transfer of all of this
information out of our humanistic institution and into the marketplace.
The weighty, loveable, historic notion of "The Library" will doubtless be
prominent in Google's marketing of its great reservoir of text, but we
would be fooled to think it means that the values indicated by that word
(equity of access, collective ownership, privacy, organization,
bibliography, and librarianship as a profession) were somehow in play in
Google's collection. (Note how Google is already attempting to pander to
"sentimental" librarians: "Even before we started Google, we dreamed of
making the incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly
organize searchable online," Larry Page is quoted as saying in Google's
Dec. 14 press release. By implication, our "lovingness" only needs their
technology to be made useful, and our "loving organization" of those works
is ultimately unneeded.)To spell out the obvious, what this development means is the
commercialization of the greatest research libraries in the world with a
handshake, suddenly and epochally (and not because of technological
inevitability - there are other ways that the digitization of these
collections could be handled). The commercialization of libraries has
implications both for the institution's democratic character and for the
quality of people's research. As Mark Rosenzweig wrote in an email
message to multiple lists on Wednesday,
"There is something mind-boggling about the ability of a single,
for-profit company being able to shape the future of a whole sphere
of life. Even more so when it enlists the cooperation of the public
stewards of that sphere in what amounts to a relinquishment of key
elements of responsibility to a unabashedly profit-driven
mega-corporation."I want to examine a more closely the implications of the Googlization of
research libraries, with just the beginnings of the needed attention to
the loss of privacy, the introduction of commercial bias, questions about
democratization and equity of access, the issues of disintermediation, the
decontextualization of knowledge, and the closing of the information
commons.Privacy
The privacy of library users in their reading choices has long been held
sacred in the library world. (5) In this world, the privacy of individual
citizens is understood as a precondition for their autonomous development
and their freedom of thought. This is in contrast to the corporate world,
where information about individuals as consumers - demographic
information, interests, identities, choices - is a commodity that is
bought and sold for the purpose of gaining an advantage in the great game
of selling you more stuff (6). Individuals - treated as citizens by
libraries and as consumers by the corporate world - have their privacy at
stake in Google's conquest of the information commons. (7) As Peter
McDonald pointed out in an email to the Progressive Librarians Guild and
Social Responsibilities Round Table listservs on Tuesday, Google collects
a shocking amount of personal information as it tracks users' searches
over time (see Google-watch.org for details (8)). This personal
information can be correlated with individual identities with the
cooperation of ISP's or with commercial sites that share data. At
present, this identifying information isn't shared with Google, but the
potential and the motive are both there, and the public mood is complacent
compliant. Additionally, if Google itself decides to enter the business
of selling access to these works, it will have direct access to users'
identifying information which it would undoubtedly connect to collected
information on search patterns. While libraries and library vendors do a
certain amount of usage-tracking for statistical purposes themselves, the
strong privacy ethic in libraries militates against the misuse of this
information. For example, most public libraries have adopted a policy of
destroying personal information once it is no longer absolutely needed,
making it unavailable to intelligence agencies whose ability to demand it
has been bolstered by the USA PATRIOT Act. (9) If people are using Google
to search or access these millions of works, they may naturally expect
their privacy as readers and citizens to be respected just as it would be
in any library, when in actuality they are being treated as consumers and
data sources for the purpose of marketing and with the possibility of
political repression. When the ultimate of aim of the disposition of
these works shifts from that of enlightenment to that of making money,
privacy is one major value that is lost. The value of our privacy is not
a matter of mere "sentimentality" but is ultimately a protection of our
freedom.The bias introduced by commercialism
Some say, "What's wrong with advertisements? The business of America is
business, and companies have a right to promote their products. How else
would we find out about them?" We certainly agree, as a society, that
there is a large (apparently ever growing) place for advertisements in our
lives. But the field of research, scholarship and education has mostly
been off-limits to commercialism, for a simple reason. The aim of
research, scholarship and education is truth, and people sense correctly
that commercial interests have the potential to distort the discovery and
the spread of truth. To a large extent they already do, by funding
"friendly" researchers, suppressing research they don't like (10), by
directly spreading disinformation via the public relations industry (11),
by influencing journalism with advertising dollars (12), and by
influencing people directly with dishonest advertising. But however
compromised it may be, in the world of scholarship and education there is
a genuine culture of intellectual honesty that stems from the communal
project of seeking and spreading truth for the common good. You do not
see advertisements for particular historic works of literature in research
libraries, or for particular publishing companies. When a work appears in
a bibliography, it is there because of the independent judgment of a
scholar or a librarian as to the significance and the relevance of that
work; it is not there because somebody is trying to sell it and make money
from it. Libraries are full of "pointers" to information, in the form of
online catalogs, indexes, large and small bibliographies in books and
articles, web-based pathfinders and the personal interactions of
librarians and researchers. These "pointers" have the value that they do
in part because of the independent judgment behind them and the ability of
the professional to match the reader to the right book for them. When a
commercial element is added, the "right book" becomes "the book I want to
sell." The commercial interest is representing only itself while the
unbiased professional is under no pressure to favor any particular vendor
or publisher, and is therefore free to attend to the user's personal quest
for truth and their efforts to contribute to society's shared store of
knowledge. Truth-seekers outside of the context of educational
institutions have an equal interest in unbiased information undistorted by
commercial interests, but in the wider world they tend to be more
vulnerable to that distortion.Google Print (TM), even in its introductory phase, plays a major role in
introducing advertising into the field of education, scholarship and
research, all the more so the more it attempts to enter the higher
education "market." At the present time Google claims not to allow
commercial interests to distort its search results (though many people,
noting the prominence of commercial clutter in their search results, are
skeptical of this). But Google's status as a private near-monopoly (in
certain respects) means that its reliably "clean" search results cannot be
guaranteed by any public policies and could be transformed into pure
e-commerce at any time. (If we find this alarming, I should point out, it
is not because of "sentimentality" but simply because of our strong
values. We should demand that these values be respected.)Democratization?
Google is claiming that their digitization project promises to democratize
access to these collections of millions of works. I have to admit that
research libraries do not really represent paragons of democracy and are
not readily accessible to most people, and not only because of geographic
barriers. I also have to admit that to the extent that a person will be
able to freely download an out-of-copyright work that Google has scanned,
access to that particular work has been democratized, and I forgive even
librarians' excitement about this development. However, there is a deeper
sense in which Google's claim to represent the democratization of
information that is presently "locked up" in libraries is a reversal of
the truth, and that reversal is dependent upon what is ultimately an odd
sense of the meaning of democracy.When these collections are digitized and made available through that simple
search box on the web, something very strange begins to happen. They
begin to take on the character of "stuff" in the same way that everything
else we download and view in web browsers has the character of
"stuff" (similarly to the way that money is "stuff"). There is a bleeding
of contexts; with no physical separation and everything on a flat plane,
there is little contextual separation between our browsing of personals
ads, our online banking, our travel reservations, our eBay, our comics,
our news and our Spinoza. All of these activities and contexts become
"democratized" in a certain sense, but not the sense we mean when we talk
about trying to build a democratic society. Web pages of 7000 words are
called "books" and look identical, or even more impressive, than true
online repositories of literature. The information carried by graphic
design has increasing importance, and may not bear any relation to truth.
The character of everything on the web becomes conditioned by the
character of the web itself, and the character of the web is strongly
determined by its overall consumer orientation and its relation to the
experience of shopping - seeing, choosing, and consuming. As the contents
of research libraries becomes "web content," the mode of the use of these
materials will be transformed according to the mode of use of the web
medium, which sees us skimming, jumping from point to point, impatient.
critical by reflex rather than by reflection, superficial and
narcissistic. In other words, the web medium tends to "dumb down" the use
of what is in it (a phenomenon that may be connected to the relationship
to the medium of television). Consumer society has indeed interpreted
democracy as something we increase as we dumb down mass media
communication and even the educational process in general. So while freer
access to out-of-copyright works is undeniably a democratic thing, we
should also pay attention to the underpinnings of that mode of access and
ask ourselves certain questions: What kind of use of these works is the
web medium itself is likely to encourage, that is, what does the
commercial web do to the nature of research and scholarship? And what
does that do to the character of our democracy? And how will these works
become connected, via a few short hyperlinks, to the distorting influence
of e-commerce?Here is a less abstract question about how truly democratizing this project
will be: How long will it take before the copyright-protected works in
these collections are available on a pay-per-download basis, turning the
equity-of-access principle of libraries, which is what gives libraries
their essential democratic character, into the principle of access for
those who can afford it? Contrary to free-marketeers, who see the market
as the truest expression of democracy, there is a contradiction inherent
between the needs of democracy and the prerogatives of the market. The
notion of democracy assumes a rational polity, assumes that the
preconditions for an intelligent, thoughtful society exist, while the
market tends to nurture what is most stupid in people, preferring to fool
them rather than to help build independent minds. Transferring these
millions of works from research libraries, even ones at ivory-tower
institutions, into a commercial enterprise such as Google, which will make
money off of them in any way it can, is superficially democratizing but
deeply contrary to democracy's need for information in the public sphere,
as useful as it might be to the more fortunate among us who have the
ability to make use of it.Disintermediation and decontextualization
Disintermediation, the substitution of "software solutions" for
professional services, has affected most areas of economic activity since
the start of the computer revolution, in librarianship no less than in any
other field. Information seekers often choose the convenience of the
internet over consultation with an information professional, or even the
consultation of a bibliography or an index. The stable exception, up to
this point, has been in the area of serious research of the kind that
requires the use of highly specialized writings, often including those
very old works. To access those materials, and to find them in their
proper context, a researcher needs to use a library and some of the many
research aids that are produced by librarians and scholars. Google's plan
will put those works in a giant bucket (so democratizingly) and enable you
to pull them out with keywords, kind of like catching fish with a net. So
much of this material requires expert knowledge even to comprehend, let
alone situate in its proper context, that disintermediated access can in
some cases be worse than no access at all.At this point I should distinguish between disintermediation in general and
its specific manifestation in the Google search box. It is possible to
build quite a lot of knowledge into a search interace to an information
resource. Access to a thesaurus of the controlled vocabulary used by an
index can be connected to the search. Reverse-citation information can be
built into the display of search results, with linking provided. Multiple
search fields can take advantage of extensive cataloging. Even when all
of this work is done, the results for the searcher are dependent on her
own knowledge level and skill at searching, and many users go away
frustrated or go away happy with material that they don't realize is of
poor quality or not as relevant as it could be. This is the major problem
librarians face with the tools offered over the web by their own
institutions.With the Google interface the problems created by disintermediation reach a
new level, because years and years of careful organization of the
materials in question will be dissolved in favor of Google's relevance
ranking system, which treats every web page and every book in Google Print
(TM) outside of its original context, funneling them all through a single
keyword search. (That librarians may have done that organizational work
"lovingly," as Larry Page put it, is irrelevant and a trivializing thing
to say, if it could even be known. More to the point is that this
organizational work was done with the aim of providing access in a
meaningful way.)There is no accommodation, in the Google world, for the myriad scholarly as
well as popular jargon and dialects even within single subject areas,
which is especially significant when works spanning hundreds of years are
in the mix, a situation that leads to a loss of recall as searches based
on idiosyncratic keywords miss relevant works that use other terms, and a
loss of relevance as works are picked up that use the same keywords in
totally different ways. This is part of the reason that subject
cataloging and indexing is useful and worth the time of professional
catalogers and indexers.In the Google world, there is no real intelligence determining what
documents (or books) are going to be the most helpful to an information
seeker, according to their intellectual problem and their knowledge
background. Making that determination is not a simple thing; it requires
knowledge of intellectual disciplines, an ability to understand people
well, and a creative mind. Keyword searches can be useful in certain
contexts, but a single keyword search for what is offered as a "whole
universe" is no substitute for a reference librarian, no matter how
sophisticated the search engine. (To say that librarians are "the most
effective search engines yet invented," as John's Hopkins University
President William Brody wrote recently (13) is quite demeaning to
librarians, for whom search engines are only one brainless tool in a large
tool set.) This is one of the reasons libraries employ professional
reference librarians to help people with their information needs.The organization of information in a library, through its catalogs,
indexes, and numerous bibliographical sources, is not something to be
regarded as having mainly a sentimental value. It is incredibly
practical. The "bucket effect" of dumping millions of texts into a
database searchable only by keywords, no matter how sophisticated the
search engine, represents a major loss of value if access to those works
via Google is compared to access through a library.I am not forgetting that these research libraries will retain ownership of
the original works, and will also own digital copies of the works that
they will be able to share in any way that they like, which I concede will
be a major benefit of the deal. Realistically, however, as Marc Meola
pointed out on COLLIB-L on Wednesday, information seekers will probably
just "Google it," trusting an algorithm and thinking they are searching
the universe, even more than they do already.Conclusion
A member of the livejournal community "libraries" posted a link to the New
York Times article Tuesday, commenting, "We're not being taken over, we're
just becoming the greatest information conglomerate of all time." (14)
This illustrates the confusion of so many internet librarians who identify
with "the Web." "The Web" is not us; it is a medium with its own effects.
And Google is not us. Google is not staffed by librarians, and does not
operate according to policies that flow out of long traditions of library
practice guaranteeing privacy, equity of access, collective ownership of
information, information in context, and personal service. This project,
as Larry Page has already put it, is about monetizing the holdings of
research libraries. It is about commercializing library collections that
it has taken centuries to build. It may be the "greatest information
conglomerate of all time," but it is not us. We are nowhere in it; we do
not control it or even influence it. We may be invited to imagine that it
is "us," that it is "a library" or even that it is "Library," and we may
be flattered by the attention, but we should take care to remember what
librarianship means in contradistinction to commercialized information, to
remember the difference between individuals-as-citizens and
individuals-as-consumers and to remember that as librarians we are public
stewards of the information commons and have an obligation to preserve and
protect it. And, to say it one last time, we must not let anyone write
off these concerns as "sentimental." They are not; what they are is
simply values-driven.Now, I suspect that there is no stopping this (though the project is likely
to be a great deal more difficult than Google anticipates), and I know that
there is no hope of nationalizing Google as a public monopoly, and no hope
of raising comparable public funds for a similarly massive public
digitization project, at least not the way things are going right now.
I also know that in ten years time I will most likely be making good use
of some of the material in Google Print (TM); I don't think I will boycott
it. But I hope that by articulating these problems (most of which relate
more to general trends than to Google specifically) I can help to advance a
critical perspective that will allow us to at least see clearly and to be
of use when crucial questions arise where the public interest is at stake.References
1. John Markoff and Edward Wyatt, "Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its
Database," New York Times, December 14, 2004, p. A1.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html2. Lynn Neary, "Google's Plan Prompts a Question: What's on the Web?" Talk
of the Nation, December 15th, 2004.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=42295703. Mark Chillingworth, "Five top libraries join Google Print revolution,"
Information World Review, December 14, 2004.
http://www.iwr.co.uk/IWR/11600674. Scott Carlson and Jeffrey R. Young, "Google Will Digitize and Search
Millions of Books From 5 Leading Research Libraries," Chronicle of Higher
Education, December 14, 2004
http://chronicle.com/free/2004/12/2004121401n.htm5. American Library Association, "Privacy: An Interpretation of the Library
Bill of Rights."
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/statementspols/statementsif/interpretations/privacy.htm6. Oscar Gandy, "Coming to Terms with the Panoptic Sort," in Computers,
Surveillance & Privacy, David Lyon and Elia Zureik, eds. (University of
Minnesota Press, 1996)7. John E. Buschman, _Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and
Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy_
(Libraries Unlimited, 2003)9. Laura Flanders, "Librarians Under Siege," The Nation, August 5, 2002
http://www.alternet.org/story/1367610. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, _Trust us, We're Experts: How
Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future_
(Tarcher/Penguin, 2002)11. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, _Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies,
Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. (Common Courage Press, 1995)12. Robert McChesney, "The Political Economy of Global Communication," in
_Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global
Communication Revolution_, Robert McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood and John
Bellamy Foster, eds. (Monthly Review Press, 1998)13. William Brody, "A Billion-Dollar IPO for Johns Hopkins," _The Johns
Hopkins University Gazette_, December 6, 2004.
http://www.jhu.edu/gazette/2004/06dec04/06brody.html14. LittlenoThing, "What I have been dreaming of," Livejournal - Libraries,
December 14, 2004.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/libraries/393043.html
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4. Google-Watch appeals to the American Library Association
December 15, 2004
Mr. Maurice J. (Mitch) Freedman
Immediate past president,
American Library AssociationDear Mr. Freedman:
As you may recall, since you reprinted my nine "Big Brother" points about
Google in your newsletter about 18 months ago, I run the site
www.google-watch.org.There are issues with Google that have come to light since then. Today the
privacy situation is more serious than the points I made 18 months ago.
These issues were exposed due to Google's introduction of Gmail last
April. Since then Google has admitted that they use a single cookie with a
unique ID in it across all of their various services. We already know that
they save the IP address and search terms of all searches done at Google,
in addition to the unique cookie ID. By now they've also collected
millions of email addresses due to the wide interest in Gmail. This makes
the cookie ID "personally identifiable."You have probably read about Google's agreement with various libraries to
digitize a portion of their collections. This has been in the news during
the past few days. (If not, you can search for "google" and "libraries" on
any current news site.)I was one of the signers of the letter at
www.privacyrights.org/ar/GmailLetter.htm. Now I am interested in helping
put out a similar letter with respect to Google's plans to digitize
material from libraries.It is my feeling that those librarians who contract with Google for access
to their books and documents for purposes of digitization should require
that any future searches done on Google that produce this material, must
respect the anonymity of the searcher. This would mean that Google cannot
record the IP address or unique ID from the cookie for such searches.
Short of this, another alternative would be for libraries to deny Google
access to any literature that has political content or relevance.As I understand it, for legal reasons Google will be interested primarily
in material that is not copyrighted.* But this could include a lot of
political and anarchist material from 100 years ago. What, for example,
would prevent Google from supplying to the FBI a list of those who read
Marx, if required to do so by subpoena?I'm aware that the ALA is already involved with discovery and lobbying on
this issue with the Justice Department over practices that evolved out of
the Patriot Act. But keep in mind that the scale of anything Google does
is a million times larger than the scale of anything that involves
discrete libraries, access to paper hard copy, and occasional subpoenas
for specific information. Perhaps the scale of what Google does is even
ten million times larger.Google is increasingly turning into a portal, in which the more Google
knows about its users, the more competitive Google becomes for purposes of
targeted advertising. This targeted advertising is over 95 percent of
their gross revenue, and it is obviously their main priority. The new
Google Groups Beta is merely the latest manifestation of this. Other major
players such as Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft are also very interested in
"personalized search." My concern is that libraries may get sucked into
this scenario if they don't take steps now to make their priorities clear.
Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft are already unstoppable, but
librarians still have time to speak out.A failure to act now could undermine decades of responsiveness to the
public sphere on the part of librarians in general and the ALA in
particular. There is a small window of opportunity here to raise this
issue. The Internet moves very quickly, and the press gets bored with old
issues quite easily. We'd have to act now.I'd be interested in hearing from you about whether the ALA might endorse
the anonymity requirement, and how I could go about making further
inquiries to the ALA.Regards,
Daniel Brandt
PIR president
_____________*Google has made arrangements with the New York Public Library and the
libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of
Oxford and the University of Michigan. Stanford and Michigan will let
Google digitize everything. New York and Harvard agreed to pilot projects.
Oxford agreed only to books and documents prior to 1901. To address
copyright issues, Google will divide material into three categories: 1)
public domain material that is displayed in its entirety without ads, 2)
copyrighted material that shows only snippets and bibliographic
information, and 3) copyrighted material where the publisher has agreed to
allow a portion to be displayed by Google, along with sponsored links that
return some money to the publisher.
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5. TO THE BODLEIAN LIBRARIAN.
Ward, F.: Confessions of a Poet (1894)
SECTION VI.
SORTES POETICÆ .TO THE BODLEIAN LIBRARIAN.
Friend, suckled with me at the same rude fount,
Rough as the fabled Roman she-wolf's breast,
While taught with me to climb the classic mount
And drink the waters of a wild unrest.
Ah, the fierce rapture of that sacred stream
Poured in thy heart and hospitable mind
The passion and the glory of a dream,
And all the freedom of the ocean wind;
And thou hast won this vision for thy own,
Though I but humbly gaze on it from far,
And passed through spaces yet unmapt, unknown,
Beyond the footstep of the last faint star.Now crownèd as a king among thy books
Thou sittest calm while subjects urge their plea,
As a great rock that marks a thousand brooks
Go babbling on down to the silent sea;
Innumerable servants round thee range
And welcome are in every human speech,
That note the fevered pulse of party change
Or troubled tide of reason's utmost reach; [20]
And all the thought of all the boundless earth
Before thee spreads the riches of its stores,
The secret of the air, the dew and dearth,
And the dim murmur of untravelled shores.Each day to thee a hundred vassals bear
Their gold and spices, and the precious gems
Fit for the monarchs of the mind to wear
And to adorn the sages' diadems;
The softest ripple of the farthest ray
Just wafted to thee with its joy unspent,
The song that dazzles for a summer day,
The thunder of a nation's argument,
The breath that trembles upon maiden lips,
The blushing of the blossom at her feet,
The tempest wrought of earthquake and eclipse,
In the grand cycle of the ages meet.Electric lines through all the seas and lands,
Where reignest thou in study long and lone,
Obey the touch of thy compelling hands
And bind the world as subject to thy throne;
The treasures of the height and of the deep,
The flowers that sparkle on the breast of night,
Unfold to thee in thy majestic sweep
The inner sweetness of their hidden sight;
Oh, thou hast glimpses there of Nature nude
And treadest where but veiled the angels dare,
In uncompanioned awful solitude
Beneath the shadow of imperial care.----
Editor's note: I like to consider this poem in the context of
a keyword search.... It's a nightmare in terms of recall and
relevance, like so much literature....
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L I B R A R Y J U I C E
ISSN 1544-9378
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