[warning : library world broad-brushing ahead ]
On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 12:56 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_jhu.edu> wrote:
> Maybe you think a distinction needs to be made, but what makes you think the
> law does?
There is a distinction so clear that I'm surprised I have to spell it
out; The GBS lawsuit is about a global company who makes /money/ from
their digital copies. A library is the opposite who is funded by
public money for the best of the public who have already paid for or
gotten donated their copies.
> Copyright protects the right to copy, whether or not you make it
> available.
Only on a superficial layman's level, not in a court of law.
> If copying without making it available is fair use, well, one
> aspect of that is what the GBS lawsuit would determine if it went to trial.
And so we should hold judgement until it does, at least to whether a
position is right or wrong? And mind you, GBS is a *US* money-making
company, a constraint that certainly does not hold in terms of "the
library world".
> Libraries do have some exemptions to make archival copies that they don't
> show to anyone or let anyone use, I am unclear on the details of when they
> apply or if they could apply with digital copies (probably only of digital
> copies that hte library made themselves of things the library still has in
> their stacks and keeps there, if anything)
Well, until you know for sure ...
> but that's not really what you
> were proposing, is it?
Uh, yes. So, to clear up future discussions, what do you think I'm
really proposing?
> The library make digitizations and then not use them
> for _anything_ except backup copies just in case sometime in the future they
> are needed? I thought you were proposing that the library provide search
> over them.
Well, definitions' be cursed, use them for analysis of the content.
Just because you have the OCR doesn't mean you share it even if you
use it. It's easy enough to come up with a back-end system that could
use temporary derivative works for analysis to create new works that
no longer are derivatives. The public access, accessibility and
archival points are strong, research stronger, scholarship and
teaching equally so.
Where are the library lawyers who could make a case for such systems?
Where are the top librarians who could instigate such a process? Where
are the guts to push this when it is SO DARN FRIGGIN NEEDED RIGHT NOW
THAT I CAN'T SAY IT LOUD ENOUGH HOW IMPORTANT IT IS!? For the library
to survive, it must become relevant to the public.
But no, the usual library position is never to rock the boat, only do
as much as we can with our limited resources without daring to push
ever so slightly in fear of cut in budgets and political unhappiness,
to be in the mercy of politicians rather than the people, and in this
drain of guts we see the drain of the library ideals and function.
Yeah, I can hear you know; how dare you paint so broadly, look at all
the stuff we're doing? Organisation X and library Y has done some
project that does something slightly interesting ... Yeah, yeah, it's
always been a little project here and a daring (by library standards)
movement there, but the library ideals and the concept of what a
library is is going down the tubes to become mere archiving
institutions.
Tell me, when things *are* digitized and e-readers are like TV's,
what, exactly, does the library offer that smart software and
crowd-sourcing don't? The reference librarian who cannot give a biased
opinion? Or simply the catalogers who will become redundant with
clever software and OCR?
I'll tell you the answer, because I fear a lot of you have forgotten
it; knowledge to the people. Not information, not data, because any
odd archive can give you that. Understand this distinction, and make
yourself relevant to the people who not only crave but need that
knowledge.
> Well, that's exactly what the GBS lawsuit was about, in fact. (Contrary to
> what some now think, when the lawsuit was made, Google was not providing
> fulltext of possibly in copyright works to anyone. Only search.). You are
> incorrect if you think copyright somehow clearly allows this.
I never said it clearly allowed this to a company who makes money from
that search. I said libraries are different, and they need to stand up
for that difference so that people and politicians both hear and
understand it.
> This conversation grows tiresome.
Yes, it does. I'm tired of telling librarians about library ideals,
about archiving distinctions, about knowledge management, about
persistent identification needs and politics, that "books" is a
library-destroying concept you need to get away from, about the need
for embracing technology fully and stop playing in the sand-pit with
toys only the librarian think is cool, I'm tired of repeating over and
over that what the library world need right now are strong leaders,
people who are gutsy, that you need to initiate projects that are
daring, you need to collaborate across nations and library categories
to together make yourself relevant enough for people to become
indispensable to the future. You need to do something big and drastic,
and all you #$&^%#$*& care about are the minutea of AACR2, the
stupidity of RDA, the generally incomprehensibly FRBR, and all the
warts of MARC. At no point have you said, hey, how about we come up
with a new and crazy way to create reliable meta data? Or how to deal
with digital resources? Or what does access mean in a digital economy?
What does it mean to fund a library in a global information
market-space? (And you better have some clear idea of this before the
politicians makes some unwelcome decisions based on *their* ideas) It
just might save us from the impending doom of cumulative information
we *cannot* keep up with.
I'm out. I can tell I'm getting emotional and aggregated and nothing
good comes from that. I love the library ideals and the library people
and the buildings so much, but things are changing faster than what
libraries can keep up with. You all got library degrees. Are they
relevant to what you want to do?
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
--- http://shelter.nu/blog/ ----------------------------------------------
------------------ http://www.google.com/profiles/alexander.johannesen ---
Received on Thu Jul 28 2011 - 19:54:13 EDT