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Review of 2016 in anticipation of 2017
It is January and time once again to review what last year brought to libraries and the FDLP and where we should put our energies in the coming year. 2016 In 2016 GPO issued a series of policies that express its intentions to enhance both access to and preservation of government information. While we applaud […]
Who will control information?
Every day, it seems, there is another article in the popular press that whittles away at the very meaning of the word "library." The worst of these conflate what Google is doing with what a library does. (E.g., "The Google Library".) And every day we seen new articles about library budget cuts, library closings, library service reductions. We are, it seems, losing our libraries. There are also those ocassional articles by people of a certain age who grew up with libraries and paper-and-ink books and revere them, but these always strike a hollow note with me. Hollow, first, because they are harkening to the past and not looking for potential benefits of the future. And, second, because our collective choices are seldom driven by nostalgia; they are driven by politics and economics. It is simply unhelpful to do no more than wish for the past. In this context, I was pleased to read a piece that, though it begins sounding merely nostalgic, turns out to make some important points about the collective choices we seem to be making.
- In Defense of the Memory Theater. By Nathan Schneider. Open Letters Monthly (July 2010)
Now our job is to figure out how to be cleverer than the search engine; when certain ways of finding information become easy, the knowledge really worth having becomes what those methods don't turn up, what the crawlers somehow managed to miss. As the Temple of Knowledge comes to look ever more like the Googleplex, public libraries are downsizing their reference desks, presuming that for every query an internet search will suffice. Libraries absolutely cannot keel over and let Google replace them. They are our collective bookshelves, the memory theater for a community.What is the relevance to government information? As Schneider says:
Just as a personal bookshelf becomes the extension of one's body, a democratic society must ensure that its books are held democratically.By "held" I think he means physically controlled in the OAIS sense of digital libraries. This is about control of information. Continue reading
Not Your Father’s Censorship
Not Your Father's Censorship, Quasi-monopolies and wary governments curb Web freedoms, by HARRY LEWIS, The Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Chronicle Review", Volume 55, Issue 19, Page B9. [subscription required, but freely available here for a short time]
Now, with almost everything digitized, new communication technologies have led to a global proliferation of censorship agents, methods, and rationales.... Should we feel comfortable relying almost exclusively on private companies to help us find the truth, when we cannot know what version of the truth they are showing us?... Storing information and making it available are now service businesses, and therein lies another censorship opportunity.... U.S. copyright law is such a heavy club that it can abet censorship by parties that simply object to what people are saying about them....Harry Lewis is a professor of computer science at Harvard University and a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is a co-author of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion (Addison-Wesley, 2008). Continue reading
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