Fair use and the US Copyright Office
While looking one again for the very useful summary of fair use provided by the US Copyright Office, it occurred to me again that their homepage has no link to this document. There is also no link to the document in their FAQ. Given how much some (most?) publishers loathe fair use and seek any way possible to undermine it, I cannot help but see this omission as anything other than the result of industry pressure to hide the doctrine of fair use from the public. Surely it is not a coincidence, given that when one googles for “fair use” the Copyright Office page comes up in second position right behind Wikipedia. If one googles for “copyright reproduction,” it gets top billing. Clearly it is an oft-consulted and -cited page, which makes its absence all the more conspicuous.
If this bothers you, too, then ask the Copyright Office to add a link. Also, consider getting the word out via tweets, blogs, etc.
New HTWK library – first impressions
Today is phänoMEDIA09 at the HTWK Leipzig (University of Applied Sciences). This is a special edition of the annual Tag der Medien (Media Day), made very special by the opening of the new library and the new media center which is part of the College of Media where I teach. Given that I had some fairly strong words about this new building in a recent newspaper interview, I wanted to get inside the building and check it out. As luck would have it, I hooked up with a tour given by the library’s director, Klaus-Steffen Dittrich.
I am impressed. Despite a somewhat awkward external shape, the interior architecture, which I had feared would be equally severe and austere, works well (this is a question of personal taste, of course). The lighting concept is particularly nice, given that the architect opted for direct lighting as opposed to wasteful ceiling lights. It means that work spaces are sufficiently bright without giving the rooms that overkill “surgical ward” lighting so often found in public buildings.
There are plenty of workspaces, all near windows or openings to other floors, so no one needs to feel like they are locked in a monk’s cell. The green carpeting (I do admire the German fearlessness regarding bold colors), perhaps not the world’s most delightful color, melds well with the plain concrete walls, and the touches of color elsewhere–red lights in one space, blue walls in another, etc.–also help break up the visual monotony and give the visitor a subtle sense of orientation.
The computer technology is brand new, and WLAN is available throughout. There are two rooms outfitted with superior computers designed for video and sound editing, and the library made the laudable choice not to restrict access to those rooms unless that proves absolutely necessary due to popularity.
All in all, it is a work of architecture that one cannot overlook. Love it or hate it, it will make and impression on anyone who sees it. Whether it wears well or not over the years we cannot know, but for now it adds a pronounced focal point to the HTWK’s main location here in Leipzig’s Südvorstadt.
But …
I would be remiss if I did not mention some of the less than successful elements. First and foremost, this lovely (and expensive) building will be open a grand total of 50 hours per week. It has custom designed lights, tables, desk lamps, and so forth, and will be open 50 hours per week, with no opening hours on the weekends, nor before 9:00 am nor after 8:00 pm. For a point of reference, even most cash-strapped public libraries in the US offer 60+ opening hours and at least some weekend hours, while academic libraries start at about 90 hours per week and go up from there. In Germany, it is no different. There are 24/7 libraries here, and most academic libraries have gotten on board and bumped up their hours, sometimes using some very creative staffing models.
It is also, sadly, in one sense a rehash of an old architectural library trope, namely, a shell built around a framework of book shelves. Other than in the first floor entrance area, one cannot turn around without running into or having one’s sight line blocked by a bookshelf. On the one hand, I am grateful that the HTWK library uses open stacks, but given that this is a new building, and that we all know that a vast portion of any academic library’s collection never or at best rarely circulates, it would have been wiser to reduce the footprint of the shelving and use more space for collaborative study spaces, study carrels, instructional spaces for classes, media viewing, and the like. Many newer libraries, from the 1990s forward, do exactly this. My trained librarian eye constantly scanned the shelves as we walked around, and I saw myriad titles where I knew I could easily tuck a 20€ bill in the pages and come back in two years and find it untouched. When are libraries going to stop housing low use materials in the most expensive real estate possible? Low use merits low cost.
The irony of the tour I went on was that it was actually advertised as a lecture by Dr. Dittrich on access to new media. I was excited to have a chance to hear his thoughts on this topic, having excoriated the library in my interview and, as I learned through the grapevine, not exactly ingratiating myself to the HTWK administration. Alas, new media did not come up much, although Dr. Dittrich did mention that about 30-35% of the acquisitions budget goes for electronic materials. This reinforces my perception that the HTWK actually offers a decent amount of electronic content, not that many students are aware of this or have any idea how to take advantage of it. The library does not do much to facilitate that use (no link resolver, no clear and concise online help, no solid pantopical or catchall database, etc.), and as an instructor here, that frustrates me greatly.
Both in Germany and in the US, there are many librarians preaching the word that libraries today are about information technology and providing unmediated (and lightweight) online services to users. If there is a grain of truth to that–and a glance at the research and our own statistically supported usage patterns tells us clearly that there is–then a library in 2009 has to be more than a beautiful house for books.
What do librarians do?
The second video created by my Mediendesign students here at the HTWK-Leipzig offers an insider’s view of library education. Kudos to them for a job well done. It has a Creative Commons by-nc-nd license, so feel free to embed, reuse, etc. as the license allows.
OCLC and squeaky wheels
Had quite a shock today while teaching class. I was reenacting the “little big” search experiment I described in a post last week, and much to my surprise, had wildly different results this time around. If you search for this book on worldcat.org now, up it pops in first position. While it is gratifying to see OCLC react so quickly to feedback, I was curious whether this represented a change in their search algorithm, or rather just a quick fix for this one title to appease me.
Sadly, I suspect the latter. Doing some testing, I discovered that when you search for the term little or big, Crowley’s book now comes up in first position. Not sure how his work merits top billing for either of those terms, not when there are plenty of other books with two word titles where little or big is one of them, or one word titles that are even better matches. It is as if a database administrator got my feedback passed to them and said, fine, we’ll give you what you want and attached a high weight to this work using whatever mechanism they have for doing so. The underlying search algorithm is still a bit odd.
For example, searching for the word little brings up Crowley’s book in the first slot, the book Little Eagle in second position, but then items 3-10 are books written by someone named Little. So, two there by title keyword, eight by author. Furthermore, results 3-10 are all for German titles. Sure, I am sitting at a German IP address, but I selected English as the interface language, so why use an identifier over which I have little control rather than a deliberate user choice to rank my results? Incidentally, when I visit amazon.com from this IP address, it recognizes my IP address and adds a little note to the entry page (in German) encouraging me to visit amazon.de, but if I insist on searching at amazon.com, it returns results as if I were in the US. Amazon lets me choose how I want my results fed to me. I see no such option with worldcat.org, other than the language facet on the left, but I want my initial search to be spot on, not to have to tinker endlessly to find what I want. Librarians do that. Any usability test will reveal that an average user does not. We all know that.
Even when I log in to worldcat.org, I see no option to set my preferred locale for searching. And now that I think about it, I think it is kind of weird to change the ranking based on IP address. I did, after all, enter an English language query, so why weight German books high because I am at a German IP address. What a mess.
At any rate, Little, Big is now at the top of the list because somehow it has now been given a high weight, not because any underlying problem has been fixed. Searching for similar short, pithy titles (Kerouac’s Big Sur, Wilder’s Our Town, etc.) shows that they still land buried beneath works that are less exact matches.
Then again, I have no idea what people are seeing who might be sitting at a French, American, Russian, or Japanese IP address. Changing the ranking algorithm based on IP without giving the user a clear warning that this is occurring nor the ability to shut it off is just not right. Frankly, it renders worldcat.org useless to me when I am sitting at a German computer. Doing neat things behind the scenes with queries (aka post-query processing) is something that Roy Tennant and others have been saying for years needs to be a priority in libraries. Worldcat.org has evidently taken up the challenge, but this is not a good nor consistent implementation. Where I am does not define who I am or what I want.
Digital natives and all that
Torsten Meyer used a great line from Alan Kay on a slide at the recent GBV conference.
Technology is only technology to those born before technology.
It occurred to me today while teaching a new group of students how to use basic Web 2.0 tools (social tagging, feedreaders), so I went searching for it. Not sure I entirely agree with Kay, but for the most part I think he gets it right. I certainly think so when I see my eight-year-old daughter pick up my phone or iPod and use it with no help from me. No one had to explain to me how to dial a phone when I was a kid. To that extent, I get what Kay is saying.
Then again, it is a handy shorthand for the notion that “digital natives” assimilate all of this new technology with no struggle or effort. I don’t think that is fair to them in some ways. I certainly have students who are young enough that one could say that even Web 2.0 tools have been around for all of their conscious computing life, at least. And still they struggle to some degree, both with the tool and with the concepts behind them, which take root slowly, if surely.
Do we need other models–beyond the generational or those linked to a calendar–to describe how humans interact with technology?
Amazon vs. WorldCat – an unscientific test
Most people who work in libraries these days know implicitly that users prefer Amazon’s database to the typical library’s online catalog (user testimonial to this effect), even if the data in the Amazon database is, to put it politely, an utter mess. Little did I expect that I would join the ranks of those who prefer Amazon, being an “expert” library catalog user and all, but such is what happens when Amazon delivers and libraries fail.
So, to the test, which wasn’t really a test, but a quick search. I had (finally!) finished reading the book Little, Big by John Crowley and wanted to celebrate this minor milestone (reading contemporary American fiction is something I can rarely accomplish) by tossing up something about it on Facebook to let my family and friends know that I am indeed not illiterate. I remembered the title, but had forgotten Crowley’s name. In a fit of librarianness, I went to worldcat.org to look up his name.
I dutifully typed little big in the large, friendly search box, and got back what I can only describe as a mess, namely 39, 353 results sorted by, ahem, relevance. Now granted, Crowley did himself no favors with his title, but still, one would think an exact title match would merit high relevance. No dice. It didn’t even show up in the top 50 search results, after which I stopped looking as would any rational visitor. Being a kind soul who believes in second chances, I clicked on the advanced search and searched for little big as the title. I figured that if I helped the system out, it would return the favor and put exact title matches at the top. Still no good. 12, 575 results, and the book I sought still wasn’t in the top 50. It did no good whatsoever to change the sort (not that a casual user would ever even do this).
Frustrated, I thought, hey, wonder how Amazon does with a generic title such as this. Bullseye. Didn’t even bother to tell Amazon it was a book, and it still pulled the exact title match out of its morass of a database. Not only that, it inferred from my search that I might be a fan of Crowley, and four of the top six results are books of his.
This depressed me. It really did. I mean, OCLC is the freakin’ global flagship of libraries, with the biggest, baddest, and most structured bibliographic database going. And it got smacked down, hard, by someone who sells everything from books to enema bags. OCLC is of course pushing WorldCat Local hard these days. Wonder if we could convince Amazon to offer Amazon Local, where users had the option to buy the book or get it at a library.
The book is great, by the way. Highly recommended.
The two sides of Web scale
Web scale is certainly a concept that has taken hold in the library realm, not least due to OCLC’s efforts to build the Web scale library management system. In a recent talk (in German), I took a fairly broad swipe at OCLC’s project. I think their project is going in some interesting new directions, but it is hard these days not to see OCLC turning into something of a libraryland Google.
My concerns with their project boil down to questions of how one defines scale, and where one places one’s emphasis with scale. On the one hand, OCLC is getting scale fairly right with this project. Take local library data that on its own is rather uninteresting (it tells no stories, to paraphrase a colleague of mine) and cannot be used to drive innovative workflow processes or user services, put it together in a large aggregated database, and leverage that scale to rewrite how the library management system works. No library nor single library consortium is in a position to do this, not least since we lack data standards for much of the data we generate, which makes it difficult and expensive to aggregate such data.
On the other hand, however, OCLC is ignoring what I posit in my talk as the more important (and vexing) aspect of scale, namely organizational scale. While their approach is revolutionary, their organizational approach is well known: a vendor developing a proprietary product behind closed doors that will be sold to end users who have no access to the underlying code. Even if OCLC had the most brilliant programmers, usability experts, interface designers, etc., it would be impossible for them–based on our experiences not only with library software, but most software ever developed–to build a product that would be significantly better than software provided by other vendors. Sure, it may be a leap forward, but that leap forward will, over time, shrink and OCLC will lack the flexibility and ability to respond to that, which is what has happened to most library software vendors.
At this point one should anticipate that what I argued is that open source is the only way to go if one wants the “sea change” Andrew Pace seeks with OCLC’s project. There are myriad examples of software applications, not least when it comes to Web scale technologies, where open source products dominate their sector: Apache, MySQL, WordPress, Mediawiki, et al. What is significant about this is that these products dominate not because (or at least not only) they are free, but because they are the best product in their respective markets.
What does one get with open source? More developers, for one. Extensibility. Plug ins, themes, extensions galore. A community that buzzes with activity and contributes actively, regularly, and openly to the product in many ways. Not least, one gets insurance against the whims of a single vendor, and against the possibility that a vendor changes direction due to financial crises, acquisitions, buyouts, etc.
OCLC is certainly acting in good faith, just as Google with its “do no evil” philosophy has acted in good faith. Just as there are many people dissatisfied with Google for a variety of mostly valid reasons, it would be naive to assume that OCLC will not run into many of the same problems.
As a librarian, I do not want to be caught making the mistake again of hitching my wagon to the vision of a single vendor’s dream. Do we not have enough cautionary tales to avoid this fate? Moreover, we collectively have more software development capacity than any single vendor could ever afford. Where things break down is in the management of our libraries, where safety is valued over innovation, and where we view collaboration with suspicion in many instances. If we had more visionary library directors such as Mark Leggott at UPEI and others who have dedicated the resources of their organization to supporting and developing community-based open source solutions for libraries, we would not be in the rut in which we have been stuck for the entire Web age in libraries, waiting for some cavalier to pull us out of the muck.
The role of newspapers in civic honesty
In a lovely display of social networking, I ran across a transcript of a talk by Clay Shirky at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. I had seen a tweet, followed the link to the tweeter’s blog, left a comment, and he mentioned the talk in a reply to my comment. I loves me these intrawebs.
At any rate, Shirky’s talk is excellent and quite thought-provoking. He lays out the past and future of newspapers, and, as many do these days, thinks that the era of newspapers is pretty much coming to an end. Read the talk for the details; it is worth the time investment. I spent a large portion of the last semester arguing with one my classes about the fate of newspapers. What came out of those arguments was that we all agreed that there is a need for quality journalism, which Shirky calls accountability journalism, i.e.- journalism that acts as a check on the power of large entities. Wish I had had this transcript to use as required reading.
One point, however, on which I strongly disagree with Shirky, is that the loss of newspapers will mean that “[e]very town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption.” It is tempting to believe that he is correct and that these smaller newspapers do yeoman’s work in terms of keeping government honest. I struggle to see that that is actually the case. The context in which he said this is:
Which leaves us with a giant hole, and a very threatening one. And in the nightmare scenario that I’ve kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they’re shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.
In my experience, smaller newspapers act as mouthpieces for the ruling elites, whether those be local governments, wealthy individuals, major employers, or some other key figures. Particularly in a smaller community, there is too much at stake in biting the hand that feeds you. The inelastic advertising market served by local papers means they need ad dollars from local businesses, and unlike in larger cities, they can’t afford to piss off their local version of Ford (to riff on Shirky’s example) because there is no local Chevy to fill the gap. With local politicians, it is a question of access. If they dig too hard, they will simply be shut out of key conversations. Last, but not least, most of these papers are owned by media conglomerates that have little patience for crusading reporters, but care dearly about the bottom line. All of this conspires to make the accountability journalism Shirky speaks of all but extinct in smaller cities.
Newspapers in larger cities have (or had) the resources to do investigative journalism, plus the legal teams to make sure that their reporters were not blocked out in the manner I just described. A journalist in a smaller city may well know his legal rights to information, but will have a difficult time asserting them in a hostile climate with no legal support.
This is likely why I have not sustained a subscription to a local newspaper for the last decade and a half. There is nothing in the paper but watered-down reporting–what happened at the city council meeting, basic local business news, etc.–but no journalism, i.e.- questioning, probing, connecting the dots of disparate information into a compelling narrative. I can get that information through other channels these days, such as the people sitting in the back of the room tweeting the highlights in real time, and certainly do not need a paper to provide it.
Don’t get me wrong. As I said before, quality journalism is essential and will survive in some altered form, one can at least hope. It takes a lot of financial and legal muscle, however, to do this kind of journalism, and most smaller newspapers haven’t been up to the task for years, even before the advent of the Web and the loss of ad revenue.
What is a college?
During a conversation with a colleague here the other day, the common misunderstanding of the term college in American English reared its head yet again. I marvel that this is still the case in 2009 after the wave of educational reforms in German universities, but it is so.
Back in the 1980s, when I first encountered this issue (I did my bachelor of arts degree at a US liberal arts college, specifically Colorado College) I would nearly always hear the response, oh, yes, an American bachelor’s degree, just like our Abitur here in Germany. This was irritating on many levels, and also patently incorrect. The Abitur is a high school leaving exam, not a degree of higher education, and the insistence that a German Gymnasium was in those days better than a US high school failed to grasp the fundamental difference between our educational systems. In the US, we have only one form of high school (a Gesamtschule in German terms) where all graduates receive a diploma, so perhaps it was fair to say that the average graduate from a US high school was not of Gymnasium quality, but American high schools produced and still produce legions of highly talented graduates that are certainly on par with those who have an Abitur. In my high school days, I took an entire battery of AP tests, and having seen a fair number of Abitur test questions over the years, I would suggest that the former are more punishing.
Now that Germany has seen the rise of the Gesamtschule in so many places, thankfully this particular bias (that the Abitur equals an American bachelor’s degree) is waning. What is really making it go away of course are all of the educational reforms taking place here, where all Diplom degree programs (3-4 year programs akin to bachelor’s programs) have been replaced by, guess what, bachelor’s degrees. There are many differences between US and German bachelor’s degrees in the details–we emphasize a liberal arts curriculum that is virtually unknown here, where one takes nearly every single class within the confines of the degree major–but on the whole they represent the same level of achievement, I would suggest. Suddenly, Germans ‘get’ the American bachelor’s degree, and having a common vocabulary for degrees certainly makes things easier.
Hence I was surprised to hear from my colleague the other day his confusion about what a college is. We had previously argued (politely) about how the HTWK should translate its units into English. In German, they are called Fakultäten, and in the European context, this is frequently translated as faculty of whatever subject. He thought the HTWK should follow this trend, pointing out that almost all German universities use this term. I countered by noting that if it is truly about internationalization, then one should look beyond the European context. Other than in the British Commonwealth (e.g.- Canada, Australia, etc.), the academic subunits of a university are typically referred to as schools or colleges.
When the topic came up the other day, I remarked that at many (most?) US universities, colleges issue bachelor’s degrees, while a separate entity, typically known as the graduate school, issues master’s degrees and doctorates. Professional schools are sometimes colleges, sometimes schools, but that doesn’t seem to ruffle anyone’s feathers. My colleague objected and said, but you also have whole institutions that call themselves colleges. He is correct, of course, but he fails to see the consistent use of the term between universities and colleges. The ‘college’ within the university context is not all that different from an entire institution that calls itself a college. Colleges such as Williams, Reed, Whitman, et al. typically grant only bachelor’s degrees. A university is nothing more than a collection of colleges/schools, all of which enjoy some degree of autonomy from each other, have their own administrations, and also grant bachelor’s to their students.
Of course, the devil is in the details, but this is generally how things work, I would suggest. There are liberal arts colleges that call themselves universities because they have some small graduate division, such as Lewis & Clark’s law school or the University of Portland’s business school, and others that just use the name for some historical reason, such as Colgate University.
This topic interests me mainly because of the enduring mantra of “internationalize” that one hears in both US and German academia (and likely elsewhere, but I work in these two countries). The fact that the HTWK chooses linguistically to dwell entirely within the European context makes me wonder if the goals of this internationalization movement are actually so narrowly defined. In the US, “internationalization” is a gloss mainly for reaching out to the Asian subcontinent and East Asia. That makes perfect sense, given that these regions represent together a huge portion of the global population and are regions with fantastic economic and social growth taking place. Germany constantly laments not having elite universities; would it be heresy to suggest that if one limits oneself to the European context that that is going to be hard to change?
Carts before horses
Amazon Kindling, by oskay
In preparation for a course I will be teaching this fall, I have been reading about and researching e-book data formats and display devices. There is an impressive array of devices already on the market, or on their way to market, but it is hard not to think that something might be out of sequence here, since there is a dearth of content for these devices.
Back in 2003 at the Frankfurt Book Fair I wandered into its new technology hall and was overwhelmed by the number of e-book readers on offer. The booths were fabulous, stocked with flashy devices and cadres of young and eager women to show them off (the readers, that is). What struck me then is that, for one, I knew only a handful of people who had a clue what an e-book was, and knew even fewer who had actually read one or even wanted to read one. Not surprisingly, virtually all of those products–and many of the companies offering them–disappeared from the face of the earth. So it goes with some ideas funded by venture capital.
Now it is 2009, and the e-book charge is on again, led largely by industry titans Amazon and Sony. What is interesting about both of those firms, in contrast to those of 2003 and many of the others dabbling in readers in 2009, is that they have direct ties to content. Any publisher with half a brain picks up the phone when Amazon calls, and Sony is of course as much a media company as a hardware seller.
Beyond those two, however, there are other companies rolling out readers: Plastic Logic, Polymer Vision, Fujitsu, et al. It is hard to see how this is much different than 2003, in other words, is this still not putting the technology cart before the content horse?
Thanks to the unresolved DRM issues that haunt e-books and their adoption, none of the devices on the market or planned for the market can handle all data formats. Sure, there is a small market of overcashed executives who will pay for such gadgets to read their internal PDF documents (and have IT staff to make it all work), but that is hardly a sustainable business model, not least in this fiscal climate. A casual Web search reveals the myriad frustrations of people who have purchased readers. Clipping limits, lack of content, and pricing policies, among other topics, come up again and again.
Beyond that, it is by anyone’s estimation still a fledgling market, with a fairly small target audience of early adopters and technology pioneers. Why then, is there such a steady stream of technology companies developing consumer-level reading devices? One of them, Polymer Vision, bought the farm before they even launched their product. If I am a venture capitalist and someone says “ereader” in their pitch, I am heading for the door.
It is likely inevitable that e-books will rule the reading world in the not-too-distant future. This is not a screed about the beloved book and its eternal viability. What appears to be happening, however, is that the ‘easily’ solvable problem–i.e.- creating reasonably priced and feature-rich hardware–was solved years ago and the solutions continue to evolve. That is surely a good thing. The much more difficult problem to solve, where the whole market begins to unravel, is how to deal with content. Kindle is likely the leader in terms of the number of available titles, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 up for grabs as of August 2009. That is still a pittance compared to the number of new titles appearing worldwide, let alone those that came before. I do not propose to have the solutions for rights management, but clearly the publishers need to get on the ball to kickstart this market. Where there is content, there are readers/users. A cool device that frustrates me or, worse, limits my reading scope to those publishers with whom the distributor could strike a deal, is not going to light the world on fire.
Oh, and speaking of the world, that is one of the most damnable aspects of the whole e-book business. None of this stuff moves across international borders, at all, completely ignoring how many of the people with the disposable income to purchase such a device live their digital lives. I could buy a Kindle in Germany, but cannot download books via the built-in wireless card, only by pulling them to my computer and uploading them via USB. No thanks. I do not pay for features I cannot use. Conversely, when in the US, virtually any German content is off-limits to me, since German publishers nearly never license their digital content for the entire world, which is shortsighted, not least when you consider how many expatriate Germans are out there and that getting information digitally just might make sense for them. This is truly an area where the publishers have been so eager to protect their assets that they have missed these global opportunities.
The Bibliobrary 