Author Archives: Iris

An ebook plan by Iris Jastram and Steve Lawson

By IRIS Posted on by

Reposted from 5/9/2011*

For obvious reasons, we have been thinking about ebooks recently. We thought that the new HarperCollins policy of setting an arbitrary limit of 26 checkouts was absurd. Librarians have lost no time in pointing out just how absurd it is, showing that most books can withstand scores or even hundreds of circulations without wearing out.

But that can be a dangerous argument to make. Twenty-six circulations is unacceptable, but you say some books can go for a hundred circulations? So it should be fine if HarperCollins sets a 100 checkout limit, right? Honestly, this is not the conversation we want to have. The problem is not that the number of circulations set by the publisher is too small; the problem is that no publisher should be able to control these aspects–really any aspects–of the library’s workings.

Many librarians say they want the library to own the ebook, not simply lease or license it from the publisher. If we are to do this, we need to recognize that it’s hard to own something that lives on a for-profit corporation’s servers, whether that corporation be the publisher or Overdrive or some other vendor. Yes, there are publishers who currently sell ebook or ejournal content outright, but how many of us host those books on our own servers? If those companies went under, how long would it take us to get access for our users up and running again? Libraries cannot afford to enter into licenses that leave publishers and vendors holding all the cards. How many books in an average library are out of print, or printed by publishers that no longer exist? We believe that the publisher should publish, and the library should own, lend, and preserve.

We also understand that most libraries aren’t interested in creating their own digital “stacks” to hold all the files that make up their ebook collections. For those libraries–probably most libraries–ebook files could be hosted by a trusted not-for-profit service. The important thing is that the books would be hosted by the library or by a site or service that is working for the library, not for a publisher or vendor.

Neither of us love the current state of copyright in the United States. We believe that copyright lasts too long, protects the rights of the creator way out of proportion to the rights of the user, and leads people to limit their uses of copyrighted material far more than necessary. The solution, however, is not even more restrictive licenses. We envision a system, like the one under which paper books are bought and sold today, that does not depend on licenses. Instead, publishers would have recourse to the same protection they have had for years: copyright.

Lastly, we think that publishers have a right and a reason to be scared that libraries lending ebooks will lead to rampant and uncontrolled unauthorized copying. (And even if we didn’t believe it, it seems that they are, and it seems that we need to address that.) Accordingly, we think there is a place for digital rights management technology (DRM) to keep users from casually making unauthorized copies of ebooks. However, this, too, we believe needs to be under the control of libraries. Libraries will be likely to use the least DRM necessary to accomplish the goal of preventing unauthorized copies–in fact, it wouldn’t “manage” “digital rights,” it would simply be copy protection. Patrons could trust that there would be no library “rootkits” on library-loaned ebooks. The current state of DRM for library loans is incoherent and confusing for librarians and patrons alike. Imagine having separate loan and photocopying policies for the different print books in a library’s collection.

Phew.

Those are our main ideas. The result is a plan for libraries to buy, lend, and preserve ebooks which looks like this:

  • Libraries will purchase e books from publishers or other sources. Libraries will not license ebooks.
  • Licenses are not necessary. The entire process will be based on copyright. The publishers’ control over the ebook ends the moment it is sold to the library. This does not mean that the publisher loses the same rights it has today to sue for copyright infringement and damages.
  • Most libraries will employ a third party to be responsible for both access to and preservation of ebooks. Some libraries–probably very large public libraries or research libraries–may prefer to go it alone rather than contracting with such a service. In either case, the entity that actually keeps the files, the loan policies, the patron information, and so on, is either the library or a group working only for the library, and not for a publisher or vendor.
  • Most libraries will choose to add DRM to ebooks in the form of copy protection in order to satisfy publishers’ desires not to see unauthorized copies proliferate. Copy protection that is acceptable to libraries will be largely invisible, platform-independent, and will serve only to prevent the creation of additional complete unauthorized copies.
  • Copy protection must not interfere with readers’ rights to fair use.
  • Copy protection will never be applied by the publisher, but by the library, or by a third party hosting the ebooks under contract from the library. When dealing with paper books, we don’t allow each publisher to determine different check-out and photocopying policies for each book. We set a single policy to encourage copyright compliance for all books in the collection.

We can’t pretend this is the final word on ebooks; we aren’t even sure we are the first to propose such an idea. We know that embracing copy protection–however limited, however under library control–will be unacceptable to some librarians and activists. While we have tried to look at things from the publishers’ point of view, we realize they might find a plan such as this to be laughable.

This plan isn’t perfect. But we think it’s progress.

[Thanks to Marianne Aldrich for suggesting that it is “copy protection” rather than “digital rights management” that we are talking about.]

*Originally published on March 9th, 2011 over on Steve Lawson’s blog, See Also. Since that blog is now gone, I’m republishing the post here.

Resilience

By IRIS Posted on by

Four or five years ago, my supervisor gave me a little Christmas Cactus planted in one of those little gift pots with gold foil around them. Thank goodness it’s a cactus because I remembered to water it approximately 3 times since then.

officeplantsWell, I finally potted it for real, in real soil with a real pot and a real drainage-catching saucer. I also brought half of my unkillable house plant from home (which has its own tales of neglect and hardship to tell) to keep it company.

And look, it’s starting to stand up above the soil. And I bought a beautiful watering can that will be a pleasure to use. Often.

THATcamp Denver Takeaways

By IRIS Posted on by

I’ve been watching blog posts trickle out of THATcamps for years, and this fall I finally got a chance to attend one. As luck would have it, just as Carleton signed onto a Mellon Digital Humanities planning grant with Macalester and St. Olaf, a THATcamp popped up focused specifically on Digital Humanities and Libraries.

What a rich experience. It was populated by such a range of participants: people from large research universities, university presses, centers for digital humanities, OCLC research, major digital libraries, regular old librarians like me, and some disciplinary faculty, and some graduate students. It was a great opportunity to hear from people who are a few years ahead of where we are, to hear what questions they have now, what confusions exist that maybe we can head off before they become issues here, what workflows they’ve arrived at, what kinds of projects may be coming down the pike.

It was also an exhausting experience because the whole time I had to listen not so much to what, exactly, people were saying (since that was usually mostly irrelevant to me) but to patterns underlying the conversations: what kinds of services do institutions provide, are people mostly working in teams or alone, are the teams institutionalized or ad hoc, how do they negotiate the class differences between disciplinary faculty and library or IT partners, where do student research assistants fit into current work, what terminology do people use and where do confusions in terms exist… So many things to listen for and translate into my own context. And often I’d realize that information I’d dismissed earlier as totally irrelevant to me suddenly fit into a new pattern I was noticing, so by the end of the day I was pretty fried.

So what were some of the things that stood out as interesting or important themes or patterns? Well…

Have a Process — Allow for Exceptions

One session was about libraries becoming more involved as publishers since they often house the tools or manage the preservation and access to digital humanities projects. In my case, those tools would probably come from our IT department rather than the library. It was still really interesting, though, to hear the conversation slowly gravitate toward the consensus that in an ideal world institutions would have both a formal publication/preservation process and then also a sort of sandbox publishing process. This second process would accommodate projects that didn’t fit well into the formal containers (journals, books, wikis) or that couldn’t be evaluated in the same way prior to publication (peer review, for example). As one person said, often you have to build a thing before you know if it’s going to be worth anything, so the before-hand evaluation for publication process is largely impossible in these cases.

And in fact this became one of the major themes of the day for me. It seems that in order to support digital humanities projects, the goal is always to have the project based in tools, support structures, and data that are already present and ready for that kind of project. But there are also a lot of projects that simply won’t fit into existing structures, and so many programs provided capacity to work on these “boutique” projects. One woman had a phrase I really liked, saying that she looked at these as “first of a kind projects, rather than one of a kind projects.” The idea is to use these boutique projects to develop tools or services that the become part of the standard suite of support options, therefore taking less effort the next time.

Collaboration is Difficult and Necessary

This has been a theme not just of this gathering, but of every digital-humanities-related gathering I’ve attended or heard of. One humanist at St. Olaf said point blank that the humanities have traditionally been a realm of solo work so humanists don’t really know how to play well with others. They lose control of the process, the timeline, and the outcome, and the conclusions aren’t necessarily fully their own. Another humanist at a conference hosted this fall at Carleton spoke bluntly about how this “go it alone” attitude can easily translated into almost a master/servant relationship when collaborations mix faculty and staff because this relationship fits more easily into disciplinary practices that privilege solo work. “This is my project. Please make this thing happen in the way I want.”

Library Disciplinarity

While I was at THATcamp, I started thinking that one way to think about these projects so that they maintained their collaborative nature would be to think of it almost as interdisciplinary work, where the library is a discipline more than it is a service. The library has hundreds of years of disciplinary experience with finding, organizing, using, preserving, and making accessible digital and physical items. We study the rich complexity of the interstitial spaces between discrete pieces of instantiated knowledge. We study the socio-cultural practices that develop in these spaces and that draw dynamic connections between the items. To think of ourselves as “just” a service organization is to sell ourselves short and to relegate ourselves to perpetual outsiders in these ideally collaborative pursuits.

For this reason, I also really appreciated the ways that some institutions have “Digital Scholarship” programs rather than “Digital Humanities” programs. From the CS and Library perspectives, we bring very similar portions of our disciplinary training to projects from the Humanities and the Social Sciences, so there is really no need to have separate programs to support the various disciplines. (No need, that is, after the humanities have had a chance to acclimatize themselves to this new realm of scholarship. I can absolutely see how having dedicated energies directed to the humanities is important when first getting digital humanities off the ground.)

Some Practicalities

People at THATcamp were justifiably concerned about the sustainability and scalability of their programs. Some had decided that they would provide consulting support only or that they would cap the number of active digital humanities projects they could support at any given time (with a wait list for people once an active project graduated or died). Several found that they were in high demand to help scholars develop data management plans now that humanities scholars were applying for grants that require those, and that this had been an unanticipated and heavy demand on their time. And other libraries pointed out that rather than being all things to all projects, they would specialize — so Library A might specialize in text analysis and Library B might specialize in GIS applications for humanities. Most make use of graduate student work (we intend to employ undergraduates here).

It also became clear that initial conversations in the planning stages for a project should include some discussion of how permanent the end result is intended to be. Is this something closer to an item in our “circulating collection” that can be weeded when use dwindles and space gets tight? Or is this more like an item in “special collections” that requires greater commitment to long-term care? Who will be responsible for the server space and upgrades? Who is the intended audience and how will we get it to them? If it is interactive, how much of a change log should be available, and how much control do we exert over the kind and type of interactivity? Questions like this are not just procedural, it turns out, but can actually shape the project itself on a fundamental level.

And finally, it turns out that most projects need (but do not have) good graphic design. This is especially important for projects that involve crowdsourcing. And if you’re after interactivity, you’d best have thought about how to get people to participate (I’m reminded of Riedl’s research for this problem).

Becoming a Linguistics Librarian

By IRIS Posted on by

When I started here I had degrees in English and a degree in Library and Information Science. But I was also the librarian for languages, music, linguistics, and American Studies. A while ago I wrote about important things I learned about being a music librarian (part 1 and part 2), and about being a librarian for language departments. Well, for the last week or so, I’ve been sitting in on a linguistics class, and over the last year or so I’ve been working more closely with their upper division classes, and here are a few things I’ve learned in the process.

The Field

From the perspective of the interested outsider and the helper of undergraduates, the field is easiest for me to think of if I liken each branch of it to other fields. So there are the neuroscience-linguists, and the psychologist-linguists, and the sociologist-linguists. And lo and behold, that helps when picking databases and search terms. Happy librarian! PsycINFO and Sociological Abstracts can come in really handy to flesh out the Primary Duo (i.e. Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts and the MLA International Bibliography).

Linguistic Data

Linguists talk all the time about data and about datasets. When they do this, they mean “example sentences” or “example sounds.” So a grammar of Turkish is full of data on the Turkish language (which is distinct from a book on the grammar of Turkish, which may or may not be all that full of data). So if students want data on Turkish, I’d look for a grammar, I’d look for articles on a particular construction or sound in Turkish, and I’d look for researcher websites (using the “site:.edu” limiter in google, usually) where researchers put up their linguistic datasets.

If I were going after a much lesser known/studied language, SIL and researcher websites are probably the best bet. I find SIL’s website hard to navigate, so I search it using Google.

If there’s “nothing on my topic” I’d use Ethnologue and find related languages and see if they can be useful by analogy.

Currency Oddity

Linguistics is odd in that some of the sources need to be very current indeed, particularly the parts having to do with brain science. Meanwhile, other parts of the field rely heavily on books that are 50, 60, or 80 years old. Typically, complete descriptions of languages are only done once and then amended in the literature, so it shouldn’t be very surprising if the primary source of primary data comes from a well worn book written by some African explorer in the 1920s.

Navigating the Jargon (with undergrads)

Linguistics is jargon-heavy. I often can’t even make out the wikipedia articles on the topics I’m supporting. But just like being a librarian for foreign languages, this is a good reminder for me to keep my consultations highly collaborative with the student. They supply the terms, I suggest ways to come up with terms (“what kind of a thing is a genitive? a Case? Ok, so what if we look for Russian cases if we’re not finding what we want when searching for Russian Genitives?”). They interpret the results while I give them pointers about categories of things to watch for in the results.

Jargon is also your friend because it makes keyword searching so much easier than in the humanities. “Ergative-Absolutive” is far more likely to return accurate results than “performance of self” regardless of my level of understanding.

My next steps

I’ve been pretty happy with my research guide for Linguistics, and they’ve said that it’s very useful. But now that I’ve sat in on a couple of class sessions I think I’ll add a tab on gathering linguistic data. And if I can, I’ll try to sit in on some different classes next term.