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The internet, Google, libraries
Thanks to my fellow blogger for the link to Fister's article. I recently came across an article (linked through that splendid online publication brought to us by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts and Letters Daily) that offers more food for thought. Titled Better than Free,this thoughtful piece by Kevin Kelly of Wired discusses how we might be able to add value to the vast amount of free information now available - value that people will be willing to pay for. He says that "The internet is a copy machine....When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can't be copied?" He discusses eight "generative values" that are better than free:
immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability. All of these are relevant to librarians as we adjust our skill sets to provide information available on the internet.
Fister on Privacy, Facebook, Google, Libraries
This is a very useful and thoughtful piece that starts with musings on Facebook and privacy issues and addresses much larger issues that affect libraries and library users and academic publishing. This is a must read.
- Face Value, By Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed (Feb. 18, 2008).
Sample:
Libraries have always taken privacy seriously - not because it's valuable in itself, but because it's a necessary condition for the freedom to read whatever you want without risk of penalty. When the PATRIOT Act was passed, librarians checked to make sure their databases erased the connection between a book and its borrower as soon as the book was returned. That erasure, however, makes it harder to offer the kind of personalization, such as recommendations based on previous book choices, that the public increasingly expects from online systems. After all, it's what they get from Amazon.
...[W]e've barely begun to examine the unintended consequences of the Faustian bargain we strike when we share content through privately-owned digital domains of the public sphere.
Joe Esposito pointed to this article in a posting to the liblicense-l mailing list and he says:
As I was reading this, I reflected on an ongoing conversation with a friend of mine, a former Congressional staffer, about the growing political need for Google to be declared a regulated public utiility, like the AT&T of yesteryear. Too much power in the hands of too few: it's morally wrong, and socially dangerous.
I would just add to this that, when we rely on the government to be the only official repository of all government information, we are putting too much power in the hands of too few. We are allowing the government to be the only entity that controls access to that information and the privacy or lack of privacy of all readers of that information. The solution to that is to build collections of digital government information is libraries. We have barely begun to understand the Faustian bargain we strike when we share content through a single government-controlled digital repository.
Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her blog is barbara fister's place.
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Most fed data is un-Googleable
As we've noted here before (Is your search engine finding the government information you need?), the problem of relying on commercial search engines to find government information is that a lot of government information on the web goes un-indexed by those search engines.
- Most fed data is un-Googleable By Jason Miller FCW (December 17, 2007). "After five years, a major E-Gov Act provision goes unmet because of search problems."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, says "There are more than 2,000 federal government Web sites not included in commercial search engine results. Is it accidental, or is there a policy, or it is just laziness? I would like to know why" and "Agencies do not let commercial search engines index their sites."
I wonder if that is true? I wonder if there is any document librarian who can answer that question or point to which sites are not indexed?
It is probably closer to the truth to say, along with John Needham, Google's manager for public-sector content partnerships, that government "databases" are being missed by web crawlers and that "Agencies are concerned more about how information is presented than if users are finding it." In other words, agencies would probably like to have their information indexed, but haven't figured out how to do so, or don't have the budgets to do what is necessary. It probably isn't "laziness" but lack of funds and other resources; it probably is sometimes "accidental" in that some may not know what to do. It is probably sometimes even "policy" -- but probably less often.
But, one big problem is that we don't really know the scope of the problem or the cause. FDLP librarians should be pushing GPO, researchers, and library schools to research these issues so we have answers.
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Is your search engine finding the government information you need?
The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and OMB Watch have released a report, Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found Through Commercial Search Engines (Dec. 11, 2007), that highlights "a critical gap in online access to vital government information." The press release for the report says:
"It is unclear if agencies know there is a roadblock between the public and their information and have not taken the adequate steps to correct the problem, or if the agencies simply do not realize that their important information is not being found and indexed by search engines," said Sean Moulton, Director of Federal Information Policy for OMB Watch. "In today's Internet age, either answer is unacceptable."The report uses several search examples that Americans might expect to result in access to trustworthy government information. Instead, the results overlook a vast amount of useful government information.
The report is also included in the testimony of Ari Schwartz, Deputy Director, Center for Democracy and Technology at the December 11, 2007 Hearing of U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access. See: CRS Reports, E-government, Thomas, indexing of the government web, and more!
Continue readingResearch Libraries Question Google Book Scanning Restrictions
Google's book-scanning project and restrictions that Microsoft places on books it scans in a similar project continue to attract attention, praise... and controversy. This article in the International Herald Tribune outlines some of the key problems of commercializing information in libraries and of libraries outsourcing one of their key functions.
- Research libraries close their books to Google and Microsoft, by Katie Hafner, International Herald Tribune, October 19, 2007.
Hafner notes that "Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they were put off by restrictions these companies wanted to place on the new digital collections."
One particular example demonstrates how Google's business plan simply does not allow for adequate scholarly access and use. Tom Garnett, director of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a group of 10 prominent natural history and botanical libraries tells the story.
Garnett said the most striking example of this came when he asked the Google representatives about a theoretical example.
"We asked, 'Suppose we allowed you to digitize all our literature, and there was an ant researcher who wanted to peel off 10,000 pages of ant literature and load it on his own server and perform advanced analysis to correlate it with climatological data over the last 100 years, using software he had developed to study trends in species research,'" Garnett recalled.
He said the Google executives told him this would not be possible. "They said, 'We'd be sympathetic but it doesn't fit in with our model.'" Smith [Adam Smith, project management director of Google Book Search] ... said this was not the case. "It's certainly something we would work with libraries to do," he said.
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) offers an alternative to the Google project, but Hafner says that Microsoft, after joining the Open Content Alliance in 2005, "added a restriction that prohibits a book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines other than Microsoft's". This was news to me and I was not able to confirm that.
Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley and author of The social life of information, says, "There are two opposed pathways being mapped out. One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear." And Doron Weber, a program director at the Sloan Foundation, which has made several grants to libraries for digitization, says, "You don't want any for-profit company having control of the world's knowledge."
[The article was online on Saturday morning October 20, but I have been unable to find it on the IHT web site since then. A copy is available here. The article is in LexisNexis and can be found by doing an "easy search" on "Major U.S. and World Publications" on the phrase "research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google" (including the quotation marks).]
[UPDATE: the article is now available on the NYT website:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/technology/22library.html ]
See also: On Google's Monetization of Libraries, By Rory Litwin, Library Juice 7:26 (December 17, 2004).
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