Category Archives: random thoughts

Focal Flexibility

By IRIS Posted on by

One of my favorite metaphors for humanistic inquiry is “unpacking.” Sometimes it feels like an over-full suite case springing open, scattering previously unseen clothing and toiletries all over the place and revealing that present that grandma brought for you nestled there in the center. Sometimes it feels like carefully and laboriously picking the infinitely delicate locks on a briefcase, not knowing if what you’ll find inside will be precious or just some long-forgotten trash.

Unpacking means finding and reveling in richness and awe-inspring reality. Facility with unpacking is a tantalizing scholarly goal.

Little wonder, then, that my students balk a bit when I force them away from that goal. During one session where the professor and I were trying to get students to plot the interrelationships of some articles by finding their commonalities (either topic or approach or theoretical underpinnings), one student complained that “it seems like we’re reducing these articles down to their least interesting, most simplistic components.”

And we were, in a way. We were doing the opposite of unpacking. We were packing them carefully into suitcases, shirts on one side and pants on another, with no thought to the color, weave, or provenance of the individual pieces.

FocalFlexibility

Focal Flexibility – by Iris Jastram

It hadn’t occurred to me before that moment how important focal flexibility is — the ability to see a given work in all its richness and unpackable complexity, and also see it as one of a constellation of other works — to be able to plot it dispassionately amongst its peers, and also gaze at its internal universes.

Dreaming of libraries

By IRIS Posted on by

There’s a recurring character in my dreams about work. He’s an independent researcher/hobbyist who’s obsessed with a particular artist. Both the researcher and the object of his obsession are fictional, as far as I know, but the fact that the artist doesn’t exist doesn’t seem to deter this non-existent researcher from being incredibly passionate about the research.

Often in my dreams the researcher is at a microfilm machine. Every once in a while in my dreams he comes to plead his case that we should acquire the definitive index of the artist’s work and of related criticism: Baker’s Index, or just “The Baker’s.” How can we consider ourselves a real library with out The Baker’s? Of course it’s expensive and unfortunately it’s out of print, but that shouldn’t deter us. His own work is crippled without it, and he’s sure many a student has turned away from important research paths for lack of ready access to The Baker’s. 

Last night in my dream, I was working at a microfilm machine, and he stood beside me until I finally asked what he needed. He launched into his familiar plea, and I countered (as usual) by reminding him that this is a curricular collection and that we don’t have any course-work related to his beloved artist. Important as the work may be, objectively, it simply doesn’t fall within our collection development policy. He brought over an encyclopedia that had an entry on his artist and showed me how pathetically inadequate that entry was, and the images of the artist’s work were so small that it was impossible to investigate them closely. I showed him ARTstor, and he railed against the fickleness of search.

“Search for ‘Is,’” he instructed.

“Really? Just the word ‘is?’” I asked, but did as he wanted.

Predictably, the results weren’t to his liking.

“What were you hoping for?” I asked.

“I was hoping it would bring back a famous photograph entitled ‘What is he doing, anyway.’ But your stupid search box is just completely unequal to the task, apparently.”

Since it turns out that he knew a lot about that photograph, I showed him the advanced search options only to look over and find that he was sketching out the various search boxes in red pen into the entry for his artist in the reviled encyclopedia.

At this point I stood up and said what I think I’ve been wanting to say to him in all previous dreams: “You are no longer welcome here. Please leave.” He had tested my patience through countless dreams, refused to listen to reason, and was so dismissive of our services and collection that he would rail at me while drawing in our encyclopedias. I’d had enough.

Such a feeling of righteous indignation, of spurned patience ending in entirely justified consequences that, in my dream at least, I had the authority to dispense on the spot. It was wonderful.

I wonder if I’ll ever dream of him again.

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.