⌘f

backyard poultry raising

July 11, 2008 – 6:12 pm by caleb

The first thing I did when I decided to raise chickens was put a hold on every book in the library with chicken or poultry in the subject heading. By far, the most informative and entertaining one I read is John Festus Adams’ Backyard poultry raising: the chicken-growing, egg-laying, feather-plucking, incubating, caponizing, finger-licking handbook, published in 1977.

Judging a book by its cover, in this case an astounding 70s design complete with an iconic chicken-as-farmer, I knew I was going to like it. I did. The book provided me everything I needed to know about raising chickens with no direct instruction at all, or none that I remember anyway. What makes this book such a rare treat are the author’s anecdotes about raising various birds - chickens, turkeys, ducks, an owl, an eagle - and the pervasive idea that anything can happen, it usually does, and it’s a blast.

Right at the start of the book, Adams warns us not to take chickens too seriously.

The reasons any particular person keeps, or wants to keep, chickens will be found to include one or more of these three options: for eggs, for meat, or for the hell of it.

When I went around talking to my neighbors of my fowl intentions, they each asked, “for eggs or for meat?”, seemingly oblivious of the third option. I plan to get both, and sure, there’s something to the back-to-the-yard movement’s desire to know where your food comes from, but Adams’ attitude provides the most enduring reason to raise chickens or do anything else: to enjoy it.

Adams was then a professor of English at Washington State University and the consummate homesteader. Besides his book on chickens, he wrote about gardening, beekeeping, and homebrewing, translated Anglo-Saxon poetry and published a novel. He’s both renaissance man and country boy, and all of his books that I’ve been able to get my hands share his easy style and irreverence for taking anything too seriously.

His book on homebrewing includes hangover cures, and discussing gardening, he’s the only writer I’ve known to include sex as one of the reasons home-grown foods are better than store-bought.

Even the lowly potato, freshly dug, suddenly has a flavor, a distinct, unique and subtle earthiness, suggestive of native mushrooms or the mysterious wild. My wife says there is something erotic in their earthiness. I always grow lots.

- The Epicurean Gardener (1988)

Adams’ point of view is grounding, and if it weren’t for that, he might have been some kind of 70s and 80s Michael Pollan, the gardening writer turned food writer now drying out as a food activist urging readers to start a garden to save the environment. Thank Dog.

It’s no wonder that Adams is able to inspire his readers to similar irreverence . My library’s 30 year-old copy is riddled with stickers and dog-ears, and scribbled in pencil at the beginning of a chapter is a simple instruction, “If you love chickens, call Ruby 503-233-9740″.

When I read this, I smiled. Ear to ear. I imagined a library service that brought together readers by hiding messages in books. I dreamed I was going down the rabbit hole of a chicken-centric alternative reality game. I looked up the number in Reference USA and found no one named Ruby. I waffled. I waited. I grew to love my chickens, and finally called the number.

Posted in book reports | 2 Comments »

liberation + stupidity = awesome

July 10, 2008 – 10:56 am by anne-marie

As is my wont, I just happened to read two things that I think are talking about the same thing and it’s a thing that I think is kind of important, so I’m going to talk about that thing a little bit more.  I’m re-reading A Pedagogy for Liberation right now (highly recommended, BTW) and I will probably end up having a lot of things to say about it.  But today, just the one thing.

Yesterday, I came across Martin Schwartz’s short essay in the Journal of Cell Science (thanks FemaleScienceProfessor!)  The essay’s called The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research — and if we push it just a little further, I think what Schwartz is saying is pretty much in line with what Freire and Shor advocate.  And pushed a little bit further, Schwartz does a good job articulating some things we need to keep in mind as librarians and some reasons why what we do is important.

Basically, I want to talk about this one piece of PoL here - Friere’s concept of the gnosiological cycle — or a cycle of knowing.  Basically, Freire argues that there are two, just two “distinct moments in the way we learn.”   These moments are distinct, but dialectically related — one is the moment where new knowledge is produced.  The other is the moment where new knowledge is known, or perceived.

One of the real problems with traditional classroom education is that these two moments are not treated as distinct but dialectially related, but as entirely separate. The moment of producing knowledge happens way far away from where students are expected to learn/know/perceive that knowledge.  This cheapens the cycle - it becomes not a cycle of knowing or learning, but instead of cycle of transference.

So what does this have to do with feeling stupid?  A whole lot.  Schwartz argues - kind of passionately, elegantly and wonderfully - that feeling stupid is a necessary part of producing knowledge.  Ph.D candidates come in unprepared for that.  Their coursework doesn’t prepare them to be knowledge producers; it doesn’t teach them that research is hard - it inherently means going in and dealing with stuff that you don’t know yet.

In fact, he argues that coursework does the opposite.  It makes people who are good at science feel smart, not stupid.  They get the answers right, they get good grades on tests.  They read about other people’s discoveries and they understand them.  Then they get to grad school and BANG - they are expected to be the ones making the discoveries and they are entirely unprepared for that.

“I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his area.  I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Tabue knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate).  If he didn’t have the answer, nobody did.

That’s when it hit me: nobody did.  That’s why it was a research problem.  And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve….

….The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite.  That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating.”

See, the kind of smart supported in courses and classes isn’t the cool kind of smart, and we can’t get to the cool kind of smart without feeling stupid.  He calls this “productive stupidity.”  He even uses the “liberation” word to describe it, right?  But for us, I don’t think this essay goes quite far enough.

Where I think he doesn’t go far enough is - why wait until the Ph.D level to start thinking this way?  Why talk about managing the transition from all of the other education to doctoral education — why not start re-thinking all of the other education?  Or in PoL terms - why keep those two moments in the way we learn separate until grade seventeen?  And, most importantly, why leave almost everyone there is out — out of this knowledge-producing moment?

And this is why this matters for libraries.  Because that’s what we do.  That’s what we’re for. To let anyone who wants to engage in both moments - knowledge producing and knowledge knowing.  We do it because knowing that you can make your own knowledge is liberating, and it is important.  And I think we’re some of the best advocates there are for pushing education where it needs to go to make this happen for more than the future professors.

When I was doing my first degree, one of my mentors used to tell this story about old-school history education.  There was a famous professor in his department who would teach the best of the best students and who was well known for almost never giving out A’s.  Once there was an undergraduate student who wrote a paper about which this professor waxed almost poetic.  Nothing was wrong with it - it was wonderful.  When asked why the A- instead of the A, the professor looked over the top of his glasses in utter bewilderment.   “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t publishable.”

We heard this story mostly as a “you don’t know how good you have it getting your A’s for your non-publishable papers,”  But truthfully, even a lot of scholars who would laugh and shake their heads weren’t too far different themselves in that they didn’t think of their students as producing knowledge.  I’ve been in a lot of conversations over the years with scholars who actively resisted calling what undergraduates do “scholarship” because it isn’t original, it doesn’t contribute to the disciplinary bodies of knowledge we’re all building.  I think that’s the wrong way to think about it.  I think that we need to recognize that even though undergraduates are rarely going to be ready enough, or lucky enough, to engage in research that truly represents something new - it’s new to them.  Even if they’re not fully-fledged scholars, they need to learn how to create new knowledge for themselves.

And it’s not like that’s an easy process.  We do have to learn how to do it.  We need guidance and support as we do it, and we need to do it early and often.  That’s the other reason I think these ideas are important for librarians.  We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make the mechanical processes of research easier for our students, our users, our citizens - and we should do that.  But we need to remember that there’s more to research than the processes of finding a book on the shelf, or the full-text of an article.  Research is hard.  It makes you feel stupid.  It makes you uncertain and it makes you anxious.  Nothing we can do to our systems, our services, or our collections will change that.

For all that, though, we all need to know how to do it.  Whether we’re in school or not.  Libraries - public, school, academic, whatever - are places where we should be able to do it, and places that celebrate the knowing we produce.

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Everything is Miscellaneous

July 8, 2008 – 6:57 am by caleb

At the 2008 Libraries in the Digital Age conference I attended a month ago, Jeffrey Pomerantz presented results of a study of library and information science curriculum that showed that David Weinberger’s 2007 book Everything is Miscellaneous was one of the most popular books assigned in courses on digital libraries metadata.

“That’s terrible”, I told Pomerantz, “I hated that book”.

A few months ago, I had a brief conversation with Anne-Marie about Weinberger and his ongoing debate with Andrew Keen over just how much the internet is sending our culture to hell in a handheld. At the time, I felt like both Weinberger and Keen were full of it, but realized I should at least read their books before coming down too hard on them. One down.

Most of what there is to hate about Everything is Miscellaneous is that Weinberger simplifies library organization principles in order to prove the point that card catalogs aren’t a good way to organize digital information.

Library card catalogs are an example of what Weinberger calls the “second order of order” - using sortable, paper objects to summarize metadata about a more complex three-dimensional object or text. The first order, he says, is the physical objects themselves (that can each have only one place in the world at a time). The second order was better, he says, but the problem with it is that it can never contain all the information about the object in such a small amount of space.

In the third order, the digital order, every possible bit of information about an object, and every combination of bits, is a possible point for which to access or sort that object on a moment’s notice.

I don’t disagrees that the third order reigns, but it’s hard not to take issue with Weinberger’s image of the library as a stodgy outmoded institution. Libraries were among the first institutions to embrace digital tools, first for transporting catalog records, and later for storing and accessing them. Yet, Weinberger insists on presenting libraries’ tools and methods for organizing information as if they haven’t changed since 1932.

To Weinberger, Amazon.com is the exemplar of organization in the digital age. He tells us that instead of organizing books by putting each one in a specific place on the shelf, as libraries do, Amazon.com files each book in multiple hyperlinked categories. Wonderful, I agree, and libraries have hyperlinked subject headings in online catalogs since the late 1990s, so stop hating on us, dude.

I think what irks me most is that this book could have been so much better if the author had acknowledged that libraries catalog as well as classify, and that in those ancient days, each book in a library had multiple entries in the card catalog: one for each subject heading, one for the title, and one for the author or “main entry”, the last often being multiple cards listing as much information about the object as possible.

Card catalogs were constrained by space and labor, but the principles are the same as Weinberger’s “third order”: file references to a single object in multiple places.

Of course, with that kind of background, Weinberger’s argument is much weaker: if “second-order” orders rely on paper to put access points in multiple places just the same way “third order” orders do with bits, digital objects lose their mysterious omnipresence. Suddenly, it’s not the digital objects themselves that make the “third order” so powerful, only the speed at which computers can process and sort them.

Weinberger also could have taken his argument a step further and pointed out that for digital objects, cataloging and classification are essentially the same thing. What you call it can be where you put it and where you put it can be what you call it. This was the point I kept waiting for Weinberger to make, but he never does.

Weinberger shows some love for libraries by honoring library weblog godhead S.R. Ranganathan and his faceted classification system. In building up to a discussion of why tags are better than the Dewey Decimal Classification system, Weinberger describes a tree that can rearrange it’s leaves at your whim: Ranganathan had a separate slot in his call number for “place”, “time”, “personality”, “matter” and “energy”.

Faceted cataloging is pretty good, Weinberger thinks, and advanced for its time, but not as good as throwing all your metadata into one bucket and calling everything a tag. He doesn’t prove it, but what he describes as a better way sounds to me suspiciously like making a lot of cards, calling each one an entry, and filing them alphabetically in drawers.

Everything is Miscellaneous definitely has its strong points. Weinberger shows that by applying lots and lots of tags to a digital collection, the collection’s structure hierarchy and organization can be inferred. e.g. if a lot of things tagged ‘cherry’ are also tagged ‘pie’, then cherry and pie must have something to do with each other. He argues that an organizational structure built from the bottom up can be just as good as one dictated from the top down.

And there he stops. There are all kinds of interesting things to think about in regards to tagging, flat vocabularies and folksonomies as they relate to library cataloging and classification and other forms of organization, and Weinberger shows interest in none of them. It’s just a refrain, the digital objects are here, the digital order is here, Hallelujah, please make a donation, the collection box is coming around.

To make the point, consider The Library of Congress’ flickr photostream, a wealth of pleasure and intrigue. Many images, such as Going to town on Saturday afternoon, Greene Co., Ga. (LOC), have about 70 tags, in this case including such specious descriptors as ‘old’, ‘octopus’, ‘blue’, ‘dignity’ and ‘afternoon’.

Are these valuable access points? Would a library bother adding them? How valuable is a collection when some objects have 75 tags and some have only two? When is a signal to noise ratio acceptable and when is it just noise? You’ll have to look elsewhere to find the answers.

Everything is Miscellaneous makes some good points, Weinberger’s pithy examples are fun, and as a whole, the book is provocative, so I don’t actually mind that tomorrow’s librarians are reading this book. Hell, if it provoked me, I hope it provokes some library school students too.

Posted in book reports | 9 Comments »

more about music

July 7, 2008 – 6:14 pm by rachel

at the risk of becoming ⌘-f’s arts and entertainment writer, i’m going to talk a bit more about music today. first, a story:

i have a friend who is a well-known musician, Kristin Hersh. i was riding in her minivan with her, her husband Billy, and two of her sons then aged about 4 and 9. the 4 year old, Wyatt, decided we needed to start a new band.

Wyatt: “Mama will play the guitar and Daddy will sing. Ryder (the 9 year old) will play drums and i will play bass.”

Billy: “What about Kiki” (they call me Kiki for some reason) “what will Kiki do?”

Wyatt assesses me for what feels like a very long time, his bright blue eyes darkening and narrowing as he examines me. Finally, his eyes brighten and he smiles. “Kiki? Kiki can be the fan.”

i have told this story many times, over drinks perhaps, for laughs. i like it, i think it’s a good story. it works for the “kids say the darnest things”-type conversation and also as an answer to the “do you play any instruments” question. i usually tell it with a self-deprecating tone but, in truth, i’m kind of proud of it and i feel like Wyatt, in that moment, really did know me and my strengths. i listen to music, read books, watch movies, etc, actively and creatively, with my whole brain and heart. And i like to think that little Wyatt was onto the importance of the listener/viewer/reader to the process of making art. That he was pointing out that the novel doesn’t fully exist except in mind of the reader, that the song needs a listener, the painting a viewer.

why does this matter in the context of ⌘-f? two reasons, one that i’ll talk about now and one that i’ll leave open as theme for later discussion.

First, i tell this story now as an extension of the comments i made in my first post about music as a shared and social enterprise and how maximalist copyright regimes, together with the commercialization of cultural products, threaten that enterprise. When art is an industry and the audience is a customer, what does that do to that co-creative process? When intellectual property comes to be seen as real property, what does that do to our relationship with the art we experience? Nothing good. When the culture sends the message that we can’t create art because: 1. we’re not pretty/sexy enough 2. we’re not marketable enough 3. we’re pretty much criminals if we think about doing it anyway we have a serious problem.

i promise i’ll write more substantively on these ideas someday, probably when I take the time to review the book I’m devouring right now, Arts, Inc: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights by former NEA chair, Bill Ivey. Right now, though, i just want to direct your attention to a project that my friend Kristin and her husband Billy (the parents in the story above) are doing to put the power back in the hands of the audience and artists and take it out of the hands of the businesses. The project is called CASH (coalition of artists and stakeholders) music. From their website:

CASH artists and the audiences are stake holders in common. Audiences want the art to continue. Artists want to continue creating. Supportive relationships create this flow, a read-write culture where all are parties to a richer artistic experience. CASH supports artists, their audiences — and perhaps most importantly — this vital and emerging read-write culture.

Eventually, CASH will offer a platform for any and all artists to use but, for now, there are just a few artists providing a kind of proof of concept. Kristin is using CASH to distribute a new Creative-Commons licensed track from her record-in-progress each month. She goes a step further, though, and posts the mix stems so that potential remix-ers/mashup-ers will have the tools they need to create new works based on hers. She even provides a space on the website for people to post their remixes and art inspired by her songs. The result is pretty remarkable. How does Kristin use this to put food in the mouths of those beautiful sons I was mentioning? Through subscriptions. Participant-fans can subscribe to Kristin’s work at a couple of different levels or they can take advantage of some of the special opportunities Kristin offers to help fund the music.

What does this mean for Kristin? It seems to mean the freedom to be astonishingly productive by not limiting her to a single “act”. She’s writing songs for her solo projects, playing a new collection Appalachian folk songs, writing and performing her memoirs, writing children’s books, taking photographs, writing songs and recording with her punk band, 50 Foot Wave, and even writing some songs for her original band, Throwing Muses. An artist with a major label record contract does not, it’s safe to say, usually feel such freedom to go where the muse takes her.

What does this mean for the audience? A chance to participate artistically, intellectually, and, yes, financially with the production of art that matters to them. A participant-fan posting art inspired by Kristin’s work on her website feeds more fuel back into the creative machine that made the art in the first place. The subscription supporter going to see Kristin perform her songs at a club helped make those songs possible and sustains the songs by hearing them and enjoying them.

Billy and Kristin have compared this model to the Community Supported Agriculture model where the producer and consumer share in the risk and the benefit of the production of something good and sustaining.

The thing I’d like to explore later is how this ties in with Anne-Marie’s earlier post about “best sources” because in a very real sense the “audience as co-creator” idea is tied in with the “the best source on a project is the source that gets you thinking — it sparks the idea, the understanding, or the connection that shows you where you’re going” idea. I want to think a little bit more about that but you’re tired of reading this post and i have to get to work.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

OMG - the librarian can’t find the best source

July 4, 2008 – 12:26 am by anne-marie

So this has been bothering me for a while and I haven’t been sure how to talk about it. It’s the phrase “the best source.” As in, “Google’s great for some things but librarians can really teach you how to find the best source on your topic.”

So I started really thinking about this one day at LOEX of the West when someone suggested that librarians involved in Open Access advocacy and instruction librarians are sometimes working against each other because open access advocates advocate using sources that are openly accessible and instruction librarians want people to use — the best sources. Now, I consider myself an open access advocate and a pretty good instruction librarian and I hadn’t been feeling that tension. I realized that I don’t think I do teach people to find “the best source” or even “the best sources.”

Really - I don’t even know what that phrase means.

Now, a couple of caveats here - I am not a very good relativist. I have been smacked down around a lot of seminar tables by smart people and foolish people alike for not being a very good relativist. I have had to learn to embrace the fact that my relativism has limits. So when I say “I don’t know what the best source means” it is not because “best” is a relative absolute term and I just don’t believe in that.

Two, I understand the concept of the seminal source. I don’t love the adjective but I get the phrase. I believe in it. I have had some transcendent academic experiences when I read an article, a book - some source that not only got me thinking in a new way, but that unlocked a whole discourse for me because by understanding it I had a framework to understand all kinds of things that came later.

(The Female World of Love and Ritual by Carol Smith Rosenberg. Signs - 1975. Such hard work. So changed my ideas about what history could be)

But that’s not what we talk about in libraries when we talk about “the best source.” And seriously, some of the most impact-heavy sources are also some of the most criticized and challenged. Two seconds on Google and you can find about a million references like this summary of the Big Six Information Needs step: The best source answers the exact research question or problem at the appropriate depth and breadth.

I don’t know what we even mean when we say things like that. And this honestly isn’t my snide hipstery “what would that even look like” voice. I am really asking - in the context of a real search, or a real information need - what would that even look like? Help me understand.

See, to me, the best source on a project is the source that gets you thinking — it sparks the idea, the understanding, or the connection that shows you where you’re going. You haven’t finished thinking yet and you haven’t finished writing yet - but you shift from “omg I’ll never get this done” to knowing what it is you want to say. It’s going to be entirely different from project to project and from person to person. If we could obliviate! memories and give the exact same person the exact same project and the exact same resources I’m guessing they would be pretty likely to find inspiration in a different place the second time around.

When Kate and I spoke about peer review at LOEX of the West, I’d say that our best source was this one article by David Solomon. His framework discussing five roles that journals play in scientific communities was what really pushed us where we needed to be in terms of framing the discussion. He cited another source, which we ended up using just as much in our final paper - so Solomon’s influence wouldn’t even be immediately apparent if you couldn’t get inside our brains but that doesn’t change the fact that for us, in our preparation, that source was probably the best source for us to find.

The point is that drilling down to the best source doesn’t match any kind of search process I’m familiar with. It doesn’t match how I see people exploring or discovering. It doesn’t match how I see people learning. But we say it so much - I’ve got to believe that it’s me that’s missing something. What are the situations and scenarios where we need to refine and refine - to add ANDS and ORs and parentheses until we have identified the single perfect source that answers our research question? What kind of searching is that - what kind of information need allows us to make that determination in advance of the learning, the synthesis, the analysis and the creation? What kind of learning process allows us to reject source after source as not worthy, and to keep those unworthy sources from sparking our thinking?

If I’m not missing anything, I think we need to really let the “best source” thing go. And not in the relativistic sense that there is no best. But to stop using it reflexively and un-reflectively. We need to really think about what kinds of systems, tools, lessons and conversations we can have with people to help them connect to their best sources.

Because I hope it’s clear that I think that there are best sources, but they’re slippery beasts. They can’t be discovered by drilling down, by narrowing and focusing, or by limiting oneself to a pre-selected pool of “best” resources. Well they can, but that’s not the easy way to do it and I think it’d take some dumb luck.

The easy way is still pretty hard. It involves a constant give and take of exploring and evaluating and I think it might be made harder by some of our tools. A lot of our systems in libraries are really good at getting the user to one thing, and not so good at supporting the kind of exploring and evaluating I’m talking about.

I’m looking at the catalog here - at the Virtual Reference Summit here in Oregon recently David Lankes said that the library catalog is the inventory record most organizations hide - and it is.

(Link to the video: http://ptbed.org/downloads/Innovate.mp4)

It’s the inventory record designed to help us distinguish all our stuff from all our other stuff. It is best at helping us find this book and distinguish this book from that book and that other book over there. It’s not as good at helping us explore and draw connections.

Is what the catalog does well, and has always done well, shaping how we think about searching and learning and exploring? Maybe it is. Maybe as a part of all of these conversations about the next generation of catalogs we can also take some time to re-think the idea of the best source.

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

Never thought I’d find copyright paradise in Disneyland

July 3, 2008 – 9:51 pm by rachel

as usual, i have copyright and culture on the brain.  between the UMUC CIP symposium at the end of May and ALA in Anaheim last week, i’ve got a lot of thoughts rattling around in here.  this ALA conference seemed unusually full of copyright-related material.  In addition to the usual ACRL and OITP meetings concerning copyright, there were quite a number of programs, including (but not limited to!) a screening of the excellent film Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property, the SPARC forum, the OITP Copyright 101 poster session and program, and Media Literacy, Artistic Expression, and Copyright sponsored by the ACRL copyright committee.  But I think it’s really two experiences, one at the very beginning of the conference and one at the very end, that made this ALA a particularly rich one for me as someone deeply interested in the production of culture materials and its relationship to commerce.

I had the privilege of presenting a preconference with Karen Munro and my fellow ⌘-F-er Anne-Marie Deitering.  Our talk was about instruction and social software and I was delighted and gratified that both Anne-Marie and Karen were excited about spending some of our valuable time talking about copyright issues and, particularly, advocacy around fair use and the use of Creative Commons licenses.  Lesser mortals wouldn’t have seen the strong connection there.  And I was even more excited that they let me lead that part!  What really got me, though, was how energizing the topic seemed to be for this room of librarians who didn’t know in advance that they’d be hearing a copyright sermon.  I was amused to be delivering this ode to fair use from the belly of the beast - the Disneyland Hotel.  I warned everyone in advance that if the mic cut out and the goons came to take me away, they’d know why.  I felt so proud to be part of our profession while I looked out at our participants who were all nodding emphatically, smiling, and generally seeming completely energized by my assertion that fair use is a speech issue, that fair use is our issue, and that we need to unite with others who care about these things - with the OSS programmers, with the artists and musicians, with the activist groups working on these issues like the EFF, etc, etc.  Anne-Marie commented that she felt like people were energized in part because what I was talking about was a vision for our profession, describing a vital role for us in one of the defining information issues of our time.  Personally, I couldn’t be more thrilled that, at least for that moment and for those librarians, that vision for our profession included passionate talk and action about copyright.  I left the room feeling so optimistic.

My last day at the conference held the real surprise for me, though.  Breakfast at the Hilton found me sitting at the counter next to a couple of guys from Detroit.  They asked me if I was a librarian and we got to talking.  Turns out they were 2/3s of the band, The High Strung.  The High Strung aren’t necessarily the kind of band you might expect to find at ALA (is there a kind of band you’d expect to find at ALA?) unless you’re a fan of This American Life or a librarian or patron at one of the 100 or so public libraries these guys have played in the past few years.  So the basic deal is this…teen librarian Bill Harmer got the idea to book these guys to play teen events at some public libraries in the Detroit area and the next thing you know, they’re doing a national tour of libraries.  These guys are out on the road as I write this on their THIRD tour of public libraries in the US.  What the heck does this have to do with copyright?  Here’s what I think, and tell me if this is a stretch…

I’m pretty sure that most of the librarians who book The High Strung to play shows at their library are doing it, basically, to show the kids - mostly teenagers, some younger kids - that the library is a really cool place, a place that values them, that it rocks.  And that probably works.  Because this band, and here’s the thing, they’re really good.  They’re not some kiddie band, filling some quirky niche.  These are guys you’d go see in a club.  And this is a band making honest to goodness real music.  Music because they have to.  Because they’re musicians and they have no choice.  The songs come, the songs get made, the music gets made, and the music gets shared.  Because that’s what music does.  That’s what music wants.  We’ve always gathered to the warm places - fires, community centers, churches, town halls - and made and listened to music.  Music is social and it is shared.  So, listen, this is what these guys do - they play an hour long set of terrific rock songs, not dumbed-down-for-kids songs, but literary, smart, tight rock songs, and then (and this is what kills me) they write a song with the audience.  They did this at the Gale event I saw them at at ALA and while i am absolutely terrified by and annoyed by “audience participation” as a rule — this was pretty amazing.  So think about these kids, maybe in some rural or suburban public library, going to see this band.  A real band, making real music.  And then being invited to participate in that process, the process of making real music.  And being truly respected by the musicians.  Maybe this is their first concert (remember yours?).  Maybe this is the first time they’ve experienced rock music outside of the context of the Music Industry.  Maybe this is the first chance they’ve had to see that music is a sweaty, messy, beautiful thing that has nothing to do with the business of music.  That whatever apparatus we need for the packaging and distribution of recorded music, it has nothing to do with the experience of creating songs.  together.  in one of those warm places: in this case, a library.  And I think allowing kids to have this understanding of art, of creation, is absolutely fundamental if we’re going to have any hope for a vital movement against corporate control of the products of our culture, against lawyers controling expression, and against what might be the most pernicious thing of all — the idea that making music is something only the few can do, only those that make it through the image machine that is music industry. I don’t know if the High Strung know this is what they’re doing.  I suspect they might just be musicians doing what musicians do - making music, taking to the road, sleeping in vans and foresaking their homes because the music insists on being shared town to town.

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The Oregonian, NewsBank and Us

July 3, 2008 – 6:50 pm by caleb

The Oregon State Library subsidizes the cost of databases through NewsBank and EBSCO so that all Oregon libraries can provide their patrons access to online resources. It’s an incredible program.

The word is out that NewsBank recently tripled the price for OSL’s license to the Portland Oregonian, Oregon’s newspaper of record. OSL’s Statewide Database Licensing Advisory Committee recommended to the Oregon State Library Board of Trustees that they not renew at the inflated price and instead try negotiate a deal the next time around. The Board agreed, and OSL’s contract with NewsBank will end July 31.

Oregon libraries that want electronic access to the Oregonian now have to pay with their own arms and legs, though many probably won’t even want to. For a few of the bigger libraries around the state, this is a classic late-90s library school scenario: what if you go from collecting print and print indexes to licensing online content and the online content is suddenly no longer available?

Do we go back to creating our own indexes? Learn to search what little archives are available on the Oregonian’s website? Expand the use of library-to-library reference service and interlibrary loan?

One librarian suggested to me that we take our complaints to the Oregonian and ask for help. I am skeptical that anyone at the Oregonian has any power to do anything about the situation, and even more skeptical that the people that do have power really care. I think something more is going on, and I think mass action is required.

The Oregonian is just one of the papers owned by Advance Publications - you can recognize their papers online because they all use the same crappy formulaic website design.

From what I gather, Advance Publications sold exclusive electronic rights to NewsBank for several or all of their papers for a high price. Previously, the papers were available through ProQuest and Lexis-Nexis. A NewsBank employee at the American Library Association’s 2008 Annual Conference in Anaheim confirmed that libraries around the country are facing similar issues. He specifically cited libraries in New Jersey struggling to pay for another Advance Publications paper, which I think was the Newark Star-Ledger. In our case and theirs, because of Advance Publications’ high price, NewsBank “had” to raise the price, and so the cost went up.

I asked one librarian how NewsBank could not anticipate losing customers, and she replied that they would still probably be able to sell it to the biggest libraries. NewsBank will still make a profit, only, fewer people will have access to the material.

This may seem obvious, but I think the reason this is happening is that the Oregonian and Advance Publications are struggling, or at least, they are struggling to reach a higher profit margin:

• Oregonian staff tell me they are strongly encouraged to subscribe to the paper
• The Oregonian recently eliminated their afternoon edition
• Older staff were recently offered early retirement and the Oregonian is relying more on freelancers
• The Oregonian puts an edition of the paper in public newspaper boxes with a sensationalist front page, hoping to sell more copies

It follows that Advance is doing anything they can to make a buck. They’ve already spent the money on creating the content that makes up their archives, and the more they can sell it for, the better. I don’t object to the Advance Publications or NewsBank’s right to make a profit (not until after the revolution :O), but I think the business model they are forcing on their readers is contrary to newspapers’ mission of informing the public and the free exchange of ideas. Instead of the newspaper archive being for everyone, it is now only for the rich.

For Advance Publications, the digital newspaper archive is a potential source of profit. Contrast this with the New York Times and Washington Post’s websites, where digital archives are free for everyone. Those papers’ attitude is that their digital archives are a rich source of content to draw eyes to their websites and to sell advertising with, proving that it is possible to make money and provide a public service.

I’d love to see a national boycott of the electronic editions of Advance Publications’ papers through NewsBank. I know it might not matter to Advance (who is probably just as happy to sell more articles to individuals for $2.95), but it will matter to NewsBank and it matters to us. I’ll try to get the ball rolling.

In the meantime, if there’s something you’ve read in the Oregonian that you want to read again, or a topic in Oregon history you anticipate needing to research in the near future, visit your library’s website before July 31, 2008.

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