JCDL 2009: Plenary Panel 2: Google as Library, Redux
Mike Lesk essentially derailed the topic from Google to the Kindle and digital books. This made me sad, even though i’ve been reading books on screen for pleasure since ‘96 or so. The convergence questions (digital books being read, etc, etc) did became copyright related. (Hoorah)
Next conference is in … OMG Australia! The Gold Cost. JCDL and ICADL. A Joint joint conference! (Wondering if there’s a chance i’ll get to go.)
Brisbane is an international airport, with temps 10-20°… centigrade, a location for those into nature, hunting, and hedonism.
Panel members are: [A] Andrew Dillon (Moderator), [M] Michael Lesk (Professor at Rutgers, “Save Everything”), [C] Clifford Lynch (Director of CNI, only original member of the panel), and [G] Gretchen Hoffman (librarian & lawyer).
[G] Big picture/policy: why are we interested? The societal value of information, the freedom of an educated populace.
Players: user expectation & behavior, influences the tech industry, influences content industry (by making context), influence the regulation of tech & content. While you might draw this as a circle of influence, but all the “players” affect each other.
“Congress doesn’t get it… the courts are beginning to get it.” The courts have recognized the public good of Google’s search engine in fair use cases.
[M] [LOLcat talk] “Do readers want paper or pixels?” Vannevar Bus, Archibald MacLeish on the custodianship
Not about Google, it’s about Amazon. Books borrowed, lending current fiction. Almost all reading is of in-print books, the Kindle is the thing. (I’m not sure i agree with the method of analysis of the purchasing preferences, although i believe the conclusion.)
The future is skimming and searching, snippets, multimedia, and long tail. Newspapers are dead, scholarship style is changing.
Online journal services & amazon.
@dchud captures, “Lesk: “nobody from Amazon or Google is here, so this conference is irrelevant” #jcdl2009″
[C] Series of observations: reflecting on the early promise of the book scanning project, a promise unaddressed. The trial of the century on fair use devolved in a privatized solution to the orphaned works problem. NOTE: orphaned works go far beyond books: sound recordings, photographs… the settlement just addresses orphaned works in the US.
What happens when you make collections visible? Given the constraints of copyright, we’ve made a large corpus available, but it’s old. Issues about quality & timeliness. [M] lays out some interesting observations about the future of reading and the future of books. Libraries of the future as knowledge environments: linkages between articles and databases….
Real questions about reading on screen: [C] more skeptical about the vanishing of print book. More narrow.
[Cliff thinks novels are less improved by digital presentation than things you want to search through. For me, novel reading is great on my palm, but nonfiction books (history) find a much better reception in print. We're all so different!]
How are we going to integrate across all the different corpora? (I remember Cliff’s early talks at JCDL on convergence — was that Portland?) Caught by @HCIR_GeneG as “Cliff Lynch: What do maintainers of collections need to do to facilitate integration into future DL environemnts? #jcdlgoogle #jcdl2009″
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Segue from [A]: Are we irrelevant or do we just need to get down to interop?
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First “question” (later defined as a rant) about digital reading, notes styles are very very different (by people, technology, or intent?). [I note that M has successfully derailed the questions from Google to the digital book]
C: striking how paper hasn’t exactly gone away, but hoarding of paper has — audience laughs in derision as WE ALL can envision an office of a paper hoarder. Paper hoarding “learning by osmosis” replaced by downloading so you can search against it, knowledge acquired
Q: re having books read, accessibility.
M & C: the publisher lawsuit that blocked the Kindle books from being read. [I reflect on my fave Mac service "Speak to iTunes Audiobook"]
G: here’s a place where the law is way behind the tech — gigantic club
Q: Kindle2 held up, in personal use very readable, enables acquiring books, great for temporary material. Convergence of all of this stuff…
Q: Copyright becoming less relevant as we move to contract law. (Experience with books for the blind)
G: Licenses and contracts are built on the copyright. Google’s business model is advertising. [One of these days i will write a Quakerly response to consuming advertising supported media.]
M: Sweden and the Pirate Party representative in the EU parliament.
C: notes those who believe libraries are institutionalized theft.
Q: common bond, cultural centricity
[I reflect that @Charlie_Haas's novel "The Enthusiast" provides an interesting meditation on fragmented cultural interests and coherent society for fascinating POV #jcdl2009 ]
Caught by @HCIR_GeneG “Cliff Lynch: how fragmented can news get before there is general distrust of the source? Reinforcement important. #jcdlgoogle #jcdl2009″
More testimony about reading digital books and the availability of audio books for the blind and not everyone else.
C: what are we doing wrong with advertising online? “So much of this flash based garbage that people are programmed to tune it out.”
…
G: reports on her students’ obliviousness to copyright violation, an echo to Lawrence Lessig’s plea to keep from making our children criminals. (I can’t remember if i uploaded my notes from the last talk…)
Q: Kindle enthusiast praises the ability to download excerpts of different books to preview and evaluate as an example of Fair Use.
G: asserts that this is contractual, not fair use — BUT OUGHT TO BE!
[Go Gretchen, Preach It!!]
Q: Orphaned works problem in (digital) games. If the settlements vary with content type — that will increase the confusion. Notes that Microsoft’s Blizzard division actually *changing* their terms to allow Machina, but warning that the music in the game is not owned by MS but is licensed by MS — thus MS can’t allow the reuse.
Gretchen — good example! We’re going to have to battle it out. Very disappointed that Google entered into settlement negotiations instead of being the Fair Use Trial of the Century.
C: if the settlement goes ahead it takes some of the pressure off orphaned works legislation, leaving all other media types unresolved (orphaned twice over).
G asks C: do you think it’s *solving* the orphaned works problem for books? C: it resolves it, not in the way he’d prefer. G: notes her issue is that if the author doesn’t step forward, then the work *should* go into the public domain. But the settlement goes around that….
Q: Future of scholarship (CHANGING DIRECTION)
Q: about the problem of fragmented society came back up. There’s an irony to air this greater societal worry in this space, just hours after talking about community metadata standards and how those will not be surrendered but may be bridged.
Q!!! CM brings a question up about advertising and the importance of advertising. She notes that people missed the ads in the digital version of the NYT. (Google, Amazon, and Yahoo pay attention to ad placement algorithms.)
C ads as the ultimate grey literature. Important for scholarship,
Yay: i asked my question
I’m interested by the story put forth in this AP article
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/02/international/i070646D29.DTLHere, some of the digitized University of California, Berkley maps have been georectified by David Rumsey’s team and added to Google Earth as a layer of Rumsey historical Maps. Maps of Japan, that have been available previously on the open web, are now spatially correlated with current maps. A discriminated culture group, the burakumin, now have their historical locations easily discoverable — apparently there’s little movement, so there is a strong correlation with heritage and current location — and so the issue was raised with Google. The maps were then edited (by Rumsey) to remove the historical location designations. What does the historical revisionism of this story say about Google as Library?
M cited a court case where libel was considered every time the article was accessed, but there wasn’t a physical archive model of unpublishing the paper copies (in US culture)
C mentioned two issues: Centralization & concentration, unpulishing culturally possible now, corporate dependncies when values differtn than those for a public institution
The other issue is things are becoming much more visible: cultural remix making different cultures uncomfortable (sensitive sites), person’s history haunting — campus papers historical scanning problematic.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:29 am
I agree with you that Mike Lesk shifted the focus from Google in an unfortunate way. Although the other panelists raised the issue that libraries are more than books, I don’t think that came across that well.
I am glad you asked your question, as I thought the issue was one of the central aspects of the original scope of the panel. When we rely on single sources for our information, we make that information (and thus ourselves) vulnerable to all sorts of pressures.
I am sorry I didn’t tweet your question and response, because I found it too difficult to fit into the 140 char limit, particularly since I didn’t remember the Japanese term and didn’t catch it in your question. One of the limitations of live tweeting is that you don’t have the time to look up relevant references. Will have to blog on this topic, though!