Panel 2: Ethics and Politics of Library 2.0

by Anjali Dalal | April 4, 2009 | workshops and symposia | 2 Comments

Library 2.0 is well underway and after a short break, everyone seems excited to get back.

The second panel, looking at the Ethics and Politics of the Library 2.0, is moderated by Ted Byfield, Visiting Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project and Assistant Professor at New School University.

First up we had Mary Alice Baish of the American Association of Law Libraries, who along with the other panelists has graciously offered to provide slides and resources of her presentation for posting on the ISP website.

Mary Alice Baish

Baish spoke of the 2.0 revolution taking the government by storm.

She spent sometime reviewing the way in which President Obama revolutionized the use of the Internet and social media during his campaign.  Obama has since recently putting forth  three principles that define the open government directive that he has so strongly endorsed — transparent, participatory and collaborative.

There are a variety of examples that highlight how the White House has now begun a full scale adoption of Web 2.0 — from sunshine reqirements on President Obama’s White House web site to a pledge to post non-emergency legislation for 5 days before signing and allowing public comment to a White House blog.    This technological evolution has not come without challenges.  The refomulation of White House.gov, while cleaner and much better designed, still is not search friendly.  Most docs are not in a searchable PDF format and are not particularly amenable to printing.

Acknowledging the looming challenges facing the government, Baish offered a few priorities for the government under the umbrella concept of  “e-life cycle management” — this includes developing robust finding tools (metadata), version control, official status, citation, and authentication.

Baish ended on a note of forewarning, saying that as we move forward in the digital revolution of government, we must be painfully aware of the digital divide that still plagues this country.  The success of the revolution is contingent the accessibility of key  infrastructure by American residents in both rural and urban areas.

Michael Zimmer

Next up we had Michael Zimmer, Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. Zimmer spoke largely of patron privacy and avoiding a Faustian bargain.

Citing the scholarship of Neil Postman, Zimmer cautioned that technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure.  This an important principle to remember throughout our discussion today.    Zimmer discussed how libraries are at a crossroads, balancing the need to both provide and sustain access to knowledge.   We need to ensure that we balance wisely.

One of the amazing features of access to knowledge is the development of user generated content.  However, this amazing form of democratic content production also produces many serious challenges:

• First, who owns the content?

• Second, how do we balance user generate-noise v. librarians’ expertise; specifically, how do we ensure that we are not filling our libraries with unvetted nonsense?  These challenges would imply that we need to require monitoring and perhaps censoring of UGC — something contrary to our traditional understanding of freedom of expression.
• Third, many 2.0 features require the tracking, collecting and aggregating of data on patron activities which fly in the face of  — contrary to trandational notions of anonymity in the library.  The venefits to tracking are obvious — a level of personalization that makes libraries more relevant to individual users .  The consequences are of course that aggregation of personal data is a major threat to privacy;

Zimmer concluded his talk by noting that librarians have a strong historical desire to protect privacy and intellectual freedom, beginning with the Library Bill of Rights enacted in 1939 which first codified an age old expectation.  Zimmer suggested libraries develop a code of fair information practices that include:

• notice, informed conent, and recurring opt-in.
• creation of seperate accounts so that 2.0 stuff is seperate from check out information
• avoid using cookies
• anonymize activity logs
• never release activity logs — fight subpoenas!!

Ted Striphas

Third we had Ted Striphas, Assistant Professor of Media & Cultural Studies; Director of Film & Media, Indiana University Department of Communication and Culture, who spoke of the ebooks paradox.

Jeff Bezos once described Kindle as an attack on the last bastion of analog;  he has since backed off a bit and now describes the new e-reader as not intending to “outbook the book” — rather he said they are in some ways less and in some ways more than a book — thus the ebook paradox.

Highlighting this paradox is our seeming obsession with what Gary Hall has described as “papercentrism” — the new Kindle is smaller but is always advertised in the context of paper objects.  We have a profound gravitiational pull that makes digital fall into the orbit of paper;  we expect to digital to mimic paper.  This has made simple technologies  like the text to speech fuction incredibly controversial and legally questionable.

Striphas then discussed  the increasingly instanteous communication between consumer and seller — Kindle is an extension of amazon store.   The data Amazon collects — annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights or markings– are very private, very useful pieces of information.   Since 2002, Amazon has been remaking itself as a platform to perform on and offline business;  their data services are becoming their major service — their cloud computing service exemplifies this.  Striphas posited that Amazon has become “a kind of 21st century digital utility”

Jessamyn West

The fourth panelist was Jessamyn West, Community Technologist, Librarian, and Blogger. She works in a public library that  serves a population of 900;  her library is the only place in 10-15 miles with public access to the internet.

Her experiences in rural America caused her to higlight some major infrastructure issues that are important to remember as we discuss the ethics of technological progress — specifically — what are our ethical obligations to ensure access?  In discussing this question West mentioned the following lessons she’s learned:

• Access to highs speed internet is not ubiquitious.  In her town,   everyone has dial-up.  So they have to bring their laptops to the library to get software updates — major ethical issue.
• AJAXified web requires broadband — so the major tech developments and tools have yet to reach her town.
• E-government requires tech knowledge/ability
• Overcoming the digital divide requires more than website
• Economies of scale break down with edge cases

Some good stats (from Pew) to keep us all honest:

• 55% of US adults have broadband at home (25% low income); Half between the ages of  50 and 64 have broadband (19% over 65)
• People are saving money by gettin off line — there has been a decrease of 11% in low income households (less than 20K)

Also, to think about, do patrons want to give up their privacy?  Do they understand what that means?   How do we set expectations?  What message do we send when we use these tools ourselves.

Jonathan Zittrain

Finally,  our last speaker was Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School [h/t to Doug Rand for taking notes on this section which I have copied and pasted in!]

Zittrain: “I come to you without PowerPoint, so I feel digitally naked…”

I first tried to think about some of these library issues at a meeting in 1999. It was a funereal event; we’re in the information economy, the information culture, yet libraries are tilting toward obsolescence. Brin and Page were graduate students, abandoned their studies, started a dot-com. There’s something about these forces outside the citadel vs. inside (academia).

What is the library? A pooling arrangement to deal with the problem of scarcity. The first sale doctrine (far more than fair use) is what allows the library to exist. Library lending as organized piracy — takes money out of the pockets of authors and publishers, who presumably would have killed this if they could…

The money we have is increasingly going into preserving these collections, even as physical copies are likely to matter less and less.

Say that the Google Book settlement provided for absolutely free books: We’d cheer that on…but we’d be putting libraries out of business.

Library as a verb: The act of helping shepherd people through all of this information. Recall Palfrey’s research on how kids use the internet: Almost none of them edited Wikipedia. Can you encourage the kids/patrons to imaging owning it in some way, being a part of it? Do we think of the internet as shared and participatory, where we can build on it without gatekeepers?

A guy named Brewster decides to archive the web, and just starts doing it! The Internet Archive may well be one of the largest infringements of copyright in the world. “When people want something taken down, we work it out.” Why did one guy step up and do this, rather than the academic institutions doing it?

Same with Project Gutenberg: “Let’s get volunteers to type in books!” Or the hacking-PACER project. Or Cornell’s LII. And yes, Wikipedia. And the Google book-scanning project. (You gotta hand it to the Google guys — they were bold enough to just get started, get sued, and then go double or nothing.) Or Amazon setting up the Kindle.

Why are we so reactive in academia? (That’s not always bad — like when we stand up against the Patriot Act.) But we also miss out on opportunities to do something larger. We make the perfect the enemy of the good. Thus we end up not quite getting there; overarching process that never quite get finished.

For example, I want to be able to push a button and archive the web page I’m looking at. There’s a Harvard project do this; it’s called WAX; it’s great, but totally nonfunctional for the casual user.

Lessons: Money can go a long way. (Can’t we get an earmark or something?) Scanning all those books cost $200-300 million. Shopping-cart theft costs $800 million/year!

There are some real possibilities with the digital copies that libraries will have. But we have an agreement drafted by lawyers and businesspeople, and we need to assert ourselves here.

When I think about what is the library, really: It’s a set of values, sometimes reflected by the quirky people who have stepped forward, which need to be defended and fought for and inculcated in students.

== Q&A ===

Q: What security measures are being taken to prevent identity theft, etc.?

Michael Zimmer: Attempts to anonymous information, particularly with search engine inquiries. That’s becoming increasingly problematic. If you look at everything I’ve searched in the past week, you’d probably find out who I am. The AOL data release demonstrated that. Netflix released its data set in an attempt to create a better algorithm. A scientist was able to reidentify all of the users.

Jonathan Zittrain: Maybe there should be a best-of-breed “Library Standard” for security.

Ted Striphas: Amazon’s doing well today, but what if they have financial issues? What happens to all of that data if they sell it off? Who ends up owning what you read?

Jessamyn West: One of our quandaries in small-town libraries: We only use other people’s tools. Our users aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the anonymizing features of Firefox. Can we email a patron an overdue notice, when people share email addresses? That’s our core values versus everyone else’s. That’s what makes a library a library, and not a bookstore where you can sit and read.

Michael Zimmer: Companies should be transparent. Google announced it behavioral targeting scheme; to a very very limited extent, you can see what they’re doing. If you want to collect data on me, let me see it; let me fudge it.

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