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Author: Iris

I’ve Been Netflixed

Published by Iris on Monday, December 15th, 2008

You’d think that in a small town with two four-year colleges the last thing you’d have to worry about is your movie-watching options shrinking. Not so, apparently. This fall our (admittedly dingy and icky) movie theater closed. This month our movie rental place closed. I assume Netflix and things like bittorrent are to blame, and I blame them heartily. This seriously cramps my entertainment style.

Sure, I could subscribe to Netflix, and I probably will, now. The problem is that I go for weeks and weeks without watching a single movie, and then I hit one of those weekends where all I want is to achieve a state in which my brain doesn’t have to function at all for an extended period of time. On these weekends,I rent a huge pile of movies and watch them all, regardless of quality. Netflix doesn’t seem to accommodate such binge watching very well (at least, not until faster DSL connection speeds are available in my area), and the public library isn’t open late enough on Fridays for me to realize that this will be one of those weekends and get myself over there after work. Also, I’ve seen most of their holdings.

So here I sit, Netflixed out of my passive entertainment habits. I guess that means it’s time to develop new habits.

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The problems of communication… or some of them, at least

Published by Iris on Friday, December 12th, 2008

Today, a few of us were kicking around ideas for better communicating our individual stores of professional knowledge with each other and with others in the library, and I realized that this is something I’m terrible at doing. It’s not for lack of knowing things that are happening in the wider world of librarianship, or library technology, or social tools online, or any number of other things I keep half an eye on every day. If anything, my communication problem has its cause rather than its solution in the fact that I keep half an eye on these things every day.

Day in and day out, I hear people talking about librarianship, social web tools, and library technology. Last night I was chatting with somebody while he coded modules for Evergreen. Today people discussed whether all LIS students should learn at least a little programming. In the past couple of weeks we’ve debated the merits and characteristics of unconferences, teased apart copyright issues as they apply to emerging formats, shared ideas about discovery platforms for libraries, matched people up with the bibliographic software that best suits their needs, discussed centralized virtual reference, and talked about what options exist that could help us make our catalogs more usable. That’s a lot of conversations, and many of them don’t arrive at clear conclusions or “ah HA” moments. And yet, drop by drop, they add to my knowledge of what’s going on out in the world of librarianship, and they become the back story that informs my reaction to more formal library-related “news.”

So at what point does this kind of thing become “news” that I should spread around amongst my colleagues? I’d never think to get to work the morning after such conversations and write up the equivalent of a conference report for my colleagues. Not only would this normally mean a daily email from me, but even if that were requested, I’d have the hardest time figuring out just what to include.

Here’s what I mean. Have you ever fallen out of touch with a good friend and then found that when you finally manage to contact them again, you have very little to say? And it’s not for lack of news to convey. It’s because any piece of news you convey will require too much explanation, too much back story. And really, it’s the back story that would be interesting to your long-lost friend, but you’d have to figure out how much of it to tell, and how to explain all the tangents, and… and suddenly it all seems like too much. Nobody has that kind of time. And so the conversation lags and only the vaguest information or the highlights pass back and forth, revealing nothing about the interesting and complex issues that lurk beneath those highlights.

So here I am, stuck in an odd space where it feels like I never really learn anything news-worthy because of the paucity of epiphany moments, but where I’m inundated with information all day long, and where communicating anything coherent about this information would take more time and effort than seems warranted (especially since I can never be sure which information will be useful to my colleagues).

Seems like I need a blog or something…

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Referrals: a Pledge

Published by Iris on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

I do a lot of referring. People stop into my office and I tell them to stop into another librarian’s office for better help. People come up to the reference desk and I do what I can to get them started and then refer them off to the liaison that’ll be able to go deeper. People ask me about renewing books, or getting a job in the library, or ordering books, or fixing computers, or registering for classes, or getting access to materials that we don’t have here, or any number of other questions that I can’t answer well by myself.

Sometimes these referrals are specific: “You need to talk to so-and-so, and here’s her contact information and what you can expect from her.” Sometimes they’re more vague: “You need to go talk to somebody in this special collection at the University of Minnesota.” And up until recently, I didn’t stop to think about the differences between those two types of referrals. Both get the people with a questions to somebody who can hopefully answer their questions, right?

Maybe.

I was recently on the receiving end of a non-library-related referral that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It left me wishing that there had been somebody I could have turned to for a more personal, specific referral, a referral to somebody that they knew would take me seriously and work through my questions carefully. But I was out of my element and didn’t have a nice network of people who know people who know people, so I just went where I was told and hoped for the best. What a waste of time.

I think I’ll work at making my own referrals as specific as possible from now on. If I don’t know the name of the librarian at another institution that can answer this question, I’ll find that out. I’ll call ahead. I’ll pave the way. I won’t just send lost but optimistic students into unknown territory without any assurance that the person on the other end will at least take their questions seriously.

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The OCLC Kerfuffle: In which I write much but come to few conclusions

Published by Iris on Thursday, November 20th, 2008

I’ve been watching the OCLC policy change discussion unfold slowly over the last few weeks, and I’ve got to say, I’m flummoxed. On the one hand, I don’t like the new license. I agree with most of what’s been written about the potential dangers it poses to innovation and the odd irony that member institutions will pay large sums of money to hand over their data to OCLC so that OCLC can lock it down for them. (I’ve included links to key posts and documents down at the bottom of this post, for those who’d like to catch up.) On the other hand, who am I to claim that OCLC has no right to try to sustain itself financially?

For me, the topic hinges on three main questions:

  • Is this really a change, and if so, how significant of a change is it?
  • What do they really mean by “Reasonable Use”?
  • And what does this mean for those of us that aren’t in the business of creating and maintaining bibliographic systems?

So first of all, is this really a change?

Karen Calhoun of OCLC has written more than once that the new license is just a clarification of the old license and that it serves to protect the community’s investment in the WorldCat records. She commented on Aaron Swartz’s blog post that “the policy carries forward the principles, if not the wording of the current Guidelines, which have been in place since 1987.” Later she wrote on her own blog at length and again asserted:

The difference is not in the principles, then, but the environment in which the principles are applied. The Guidelines [meaning the old policy] came from the limited data sharing environment of the 1980s. The updated policy’s landscape is the Web and the incredibly dynamic data sharing environment it represents. (cite)

In other words, the old policy protected community investment in the cooperative at a time when mass data sharing was not the norm, and the new policy protects that same community investment in the current environment where the default assumption on the web is that if there’s a big pile of data out there, anyone who wants to can play with it and make it work for them.

I have no idea whether the old policy felt restrictive 21 years ago, but I know that the new one feels restrictive now. It seems to me that the paradigm shifted right out from under OCLC and that reinforcing the principles of information sharing from 21 years ago is akin to re-inventing the information searching environment of 10-20 years ago.

It also seems to me that if libraries invest time, effort, and money into building a massive dataset, the best return on that investment would be to have people (OCLC or anyone else) take that data and make it work for us and for our patrons. This is what we do when we invest in the stock market, or even put money into savings accounts. We effectively sign it over to whomever can take it and make it work for us. The way this new policy reads, it feels more like protecting our treasures by tucking them into a safe deposit box. We rent the space and gain no interest, causing our “investment” to depreciate over time.

So maybe we’re just protecting OCLC’s investment in our data. Personally, I’d feel better about the whole thing if they just came out and said that.

What about this “Reasonable Use“ clause?

There’s also one clause in the policy that I find disturbingly vague. It’s the clause that defines “reasonable use,” and serves a very similar function in this license as the Fair Use clause serves in copyright law. Here it is:

13. “Reasonable Use” means Use of WorldCat Records that is reasonable for the intended Non-Commercial Use and consistent with the intent of this Policy. Without limiting the foregoing, the term “Reasonable Use” does not include any Use of WorldCat Records that:

a. discourages the contribution of bibliographic and holdings data to WorldCat, thus damaging OCLC Members’ investment in WorldCat, and/or
b. substantially replicates the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat. Please see the FAQ for a discussion of Z39.50 for cataloging using WorldCat-derived bibliographic records.

As Greg Schwartz noted on this week’s Uncontrolled Vocabulary, there are a lot of weasel words here. How big, how related in function, and how related in purpose does a system have to be before it violates this clause? And then there are the conspicuous “and/or” weasel words that leave OCLC room to claim license violation if any part of this clause begins to make them uneasy.

Seems to me that the biggest violator of section 13.b in existence right now is the Library of Congress, and that makes no sense at all. But if you think about it, its catalog is massive and exactly duplicates most of the functions of WorldCat. LibraryThing is also massive, but serves such a completely different purpose that I can’t see how it harms the “investment” of the cooperative. If anything, its giving the cooperative ideas about what might be possible in our own catalogs given the data they produce.

Just as a side note, I wonder if they have to grant Google and other search engines the right to crawl WorldCat.org.

Implications for those us in the public services world?

So what. Why do I care? In my day-to-day work, I search WorldCat when I need it, and I’ll continue to do so. I don’t do cataloging work. I won’t be the one deciding whether or not to put the new field that links to OCLC’s license in our records. And I certainly don’t build discovery systems that would make use of WorldCat records.

Well, I worry about two things. First, that this will stall efforts to invent a discovery system that actually works, and works well — one that patrons are happy to use, and one that puts to good use all of the metadata that catalogers put so much time and effort into creating.

I also worry that this move might implode OCLC. It has the chance to take a hard look at its “principles” and come up with creative ways to position itself as the nexis of all bibliographic data on the web, or it could spark its potential user community to rebell and rebuild elsewhere. My favorite analogy for this comes from Steve Lawson’s blog where he writes:

Coincidentally, I was reading Matthew Battles’ Library: An Unquiet History today and came across this interesting tidbit on page 29 about the Library of Alexandria:

In an effort to stop the growth of the libraries at Rhodes and Pergamum, both of which threatened Alexandria’s preeminence, the city’s rulers banned the export of papyrus. The move backfired, however, spurring the Pergamenes to invent parchment (charta pergamenum), which for its strength and reusability would prove to be the preferred writing medium in Europe for more than a thousand years.

WorldCat has been making great strides forward recently, and I would hate to see it shoot itself in the foot over a piece of papyrus. It also has an incredible treasure trove of information, one that would be a shame to have to duplicate, and one that could yield huge dividends if invested wisely rather than stuffed into a safe deposit box.

Or is this the push we all needed?

For further reading:

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