Robert Darnton: The Library -- Three Jermiads

The Library: Three Jeremiads
Robert Darnton
The New York Review of Books

...

Google represents the ultimate in business plans. By controlling access to information, it has made billions, which it is now investing in the control of the information itself. What began as Google Book Search is therefore becoming the largest library and book business in the world. Like all commercial enterprises, Google’s primary responsibility is to make money for its shareholders. Libraries exist to get books to readers—books and other forms of knowledge and entertainment, provided for free. The fundamental incompatibility of purpose between libraries and Google Book Search might be mitigated if Google could offer libraries access to its digitized database of books on reasonable terms. But the terms are embodied in a 368-page document known as the “settlement,” which is meant to resolve another conflict: the suit brought against Google by authors and publishers for alleged infringement of their copyrights.

Despite its enormous complexity, the settlement comes down to an agreement about how to divide a pie—the profits to be produced by Google Book Search: 37 percent will go to Google, 63 percent to the authors and publishers. And the libraries? They are not partners to the agreement, but many of them have provided, free of charge, the books that Google has digitized. They are being asked to buy back access to those books along with those of their sister libraries, in digitized form, for an “institutional subscription” price, which could escalate as disastrously as the price of journals. The subscription price will be set by a Book Rights Registry, which will represent the authors and publishers who have an interest in price increases. Libraries therefore fear what they call “cocaine pricing”—a strategy of beginning at a low rate and then, when customers are hooked, ratcheting up the price as high as it will go.

To become effective, the settlement must be approved by the district court in the Southern Federal District of New York. The Department of Justice has filed two memoranda with the court that raise the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that the settlement could give Google such an advantage over potential competitors as to violate antitrust laws. But the most important issue looming over the legal debate is one of public policy. Do we want to settle copyright questions by private litigation? And do we want to commercialize access to knowledge?

I hope that the answer to those questions will lead to my happy ending: a National Digital Library—or a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), as some prefer to call it. Google demonstrated the possibility of transforming the intellectual riches of our libraries, books lying inert and underused on shelves, into an electronic database that could be tapped by anyone anywhere at any time. Why not adapt its formula for success to the public good—a digital library composed of virtually all the books in our greatest research libraries available free of charge to the entire citizenry, in fact, to everyone in the world?

To dismiss this goal as naive or utopian would be to ignore digital projects that have proven their worth and feasibility throughout the last twenty years. All major research libraries have digitized parts of their collections. Since 1995 the Digital Library Federation has worked to combine their catalogues or “metadata” into a general network. More ambitious enterprises such as the Internet Archive, Knowledge Commons, and Public.Resource .Org have attempted digitization on a larger scale. They may be dwarfed by Google, but several countries are now determined to out-Google Google by scanning the entire contents of their national libraries.

In December 2009 President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced that he would make €750 million available for digitizing the French cultural “patrimony.” The National Library of the Netherlands aims to digitize within ten years every Dutch book, newspaper, and periodical produced from 1470 to the present. National libraries in Japan, Australia, Norway, and Finland are digitizing virtually all of their holdings; and Europeana, an effort to coordinate digital collections on an international scale, will have made over ten million objects—from libraries, archives, museums, and audiovisual holdings—freely accessible online by the end of 2010.

If these countries can create national digital libraries, why can’t the United States? Because of the cost, some would argue. Far more works exist in English than in Dutch or Japanese, and the Library of Congress alone contains 30 million volumes. Estimates of the cost of digitizing one page vary enormously, from ten cents (the figure cited by Brewster Kahle, who has digitized over a million books for the Internet Archive) to ten dollars, depending on the technology and the required quality. But it should be possible to digitize everything in the Library of Congress for less than Sarkozy’s €750 million—and the cost could be spread out over a decade.

The greatest obstacle is legal, not financial. Presumably, the DPLA would exclude books currently being marketed, but it would include millions of books that are out of print yet covered by copyright, especially those published between 1923 and 1964, a period when copyright coverage is most obscure, owing to the proliferation of “orphans”—books whose copyright holders have not been located. Congress would have to pass legislation to protect the DPLA from litigation concerning copyrighted, out-of-print books. The rights holders of those books would have to be compensated, yet many of them, especially among academic authors, might be willing to forgo compensation in order to give their books new life and greater diffusion in digitized form. Several authors protested against the commercial character of Google Book Search and expressed their readiness to make their work available free of charge in memoranda filed with the New York District Court.

Perhaps even Google itself could be enlisted in the cause. It has digitized about two million books in the public domain. It could turn them over to the DPLA as the foundation of a collection that would grow to include more recent books—at first those from the problematic period of 1923–1964, then those made available by their rights holders. Google would lose nothing by this generosity; each digitized book that it made available could, if other donors agree, be identified as a contribution from Google; and it might win admiration for its public-spiritedness.

Even if Google refused to cooperate, a coalition of foundations could provide enough to finance the DPLA, and a coalition of research libraries could provide the books. By working systematically through their holdings, a great collection could be formed. It would conform to the highest standards in its bibliographical apparatus, its scanning, its editorial decisions, and its commitment to preservation for the use of future generations.

Should the Google Book Search agreement not be upheld by the court, its unraveling would come at an extraordinary moment in the development of an information society. We have now reached a period of fluidity, uncertainty, and opportunity. Things have come undone, and they can be put together in new ways, subordinating private profit to the public good and providing everyone with access to a commonwealth of culture.

Would a Digital Public Library of America solve all the other problems—the inflation of journal prices, the economics of scholarly publishing, the unbalanced budgets of libraries, and the barriers to the careers of young scholars? No. Instead, it would open the way to a general transformation of the landscape in what we now call the information society. Rather than better business plans (not that they don’t matter), we need a new ecology, one based on the public good instead of private gain. This may not be a satisfactory conclusion. It’s not an answer to the problem of sustainability. It’s an appeal to change the system.

To Read the Entire Essay

Crimethinc: Building a New Kind of Infoshop

Building A New Kind Of Infoshop
by Peter P.
Crimethinc

On Saturday, November 13, a new and experimental infoshop in Winona, MN, opened it’s doors to the public. The Burrow is one of the first new infoshops to open since the controversial essay “5 Steps to Reviving Your Failing Anarchist Bookstore“, and at a time when long-standing infoshops are throwing in their towels, this account offers insight into the new models still unseen.

This story begins where our coverage of small-town organizing left off in Rolling Thunder #7. What follows is not only an account and recipe for a new type of space, but a possible intermediate step in anarchist organizing in long-term communities.

If You Build It . . .

Early on, the plan was to put a space in our home. Our friends and colleagues have known about our wild dreams for the last two years — that we’d be able to have a social space independent from the rest of our house. Now that we’ve finished most of the work, a community is waiting for us.

We knew from the start that making good on our promise would mean a lot of work and time. It would mean learning how to do things we’d never done before. Perhaps most importantly, it would mean we would have to care enough about the outcome to do things well.

The process was long, though. Visitors passed through to see the space in wholly different stages and shades. Before any work was done the wallpaper was sagging, the plaster dripping, like some paper street soap company.

The walls were first to go. We had to tear down the old walls, swinging hammers and crowbars. Carpenters call this doing “demo” and it is similar, in many ways, to the anarchist sense of the word. Of course, it wasn’t all smash. We shoveled plaster and lath. We scooped armloads of asbestos vermiculite. It was dusty, disgusting, probably deadly, and it had to be done.

To Read the Rest of the Essay and to See Pictures of the Journey/Process

Julian Assange Responds to Increasing US Government Attacks on WikiLeaks

Julian Assange Responds to Increasing US Government Attacks on WikiLeaks
Democracy Now

... WikiLeaks published the massive archive of classified military records about the war in Afghanistan, but the fallout in Washington and beyond is far from over. Justice Department lawyers are reportedly exploring whether WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange could be charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for publishing the classified Afghan war documents. Meanwhile, investigators in the Army’s criminal division have reportedly questioned two students in Boston about their ties to WikiLeaks and Private First Class Bradley Manning, a leading suspect in the leak. We speak with WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.

To Watch/Read/Listen

More:

Wikileaks

Wikileaks: Kabul War Diary

Excerpt from the Intro:

WikiLeaks today released over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.

The Afghan War Diary an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.

The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind each most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course.

Most entries have been written by soldiers and intelligence officers listening to reports radioed in from front line deployments. However the reports also contain related information from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption and development activity across Afghanistan.

Each report consists of the time and precise geographic location of an event that the US Army considers significant. It includes several additional standardized fields: The broad type of the event (combat, non-combat, propaganda, etc.); the category of the event as classified by US Forces, how many were detained, wounded, and killed from civilian, allied, host nation, and enemy forces; the name of the reporting unit and a number of other fields, the most significant of which is the summary - an English language description of the events that are covered in the report.

The Diary is available on the web and can be viewed in chronological order and by by over 100 categories assigned by the US Forces such as: "escalation of force", "friendly-fire", "development meeting", etc. The reports can also be viewed by our "severity" measure-the total number of people killed, injured or detained. All incidents have been placed onto a map of Afghanistan and can be viewed on Google Earth limited to a particular window of time or place. In this way the unfolding of the last six years of war may be seen.

The material shows that cover-ups start on the ground. When reporting their own activities US Units are inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay the number of people killed or otherwise make excuses for themselves. The reports, when made about other US Military units are more likely to be truthful, but still down play criticism. Conversely, when reporting on the actions of non-US ISAF forces the reports tend to be frank or critical and when reporting on the Taliban or other rebel groups, bad behavior is described in comprehensive detail. The behavior of the Afghan Army and Afghan authorities are also frequently described.

Kabul War Diary (To Read the Rest of the Intro and Access the Reports)

Inspiration for Visual Artists and the Literary Inclined: Part 1

BibliOdyssey

Slow Muse

Strange Maps

Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star: Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 1999.

We want to understand how these categories are made and kept invisible, and in some cases, we want to challenge the silences surrounding them. (Bowker/Star, 5)

We have a moral and ethical agenda in our querying of these systems. Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. This is not inherently a bad thing—indeed it is inescapable. But it is an ethical choice, and as such it is dangerous—not bad, but dangerous. (Bowker and Star, 5-6)

We are used to viewing moral choices as individual, as dilemmas, and as rational choices. We have an impoverished vocabulary for collective moral passages, to use Addelson’s terminology. For any individual, group or situation, classifications and standards give advantage or they give suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made, and how we may think about that invisible matching process, is at the core of the ethical project of this work. (Bowker and Star, 6)

No real-world classification system that we have looked at meets these “simple” requirements and we doubt that any ever could. In the case of unique classificatory systems, people disagree about their nature; they ignore or misunderstand them; or they routinely mix together different and contradictory principles. A library, for example, may have a consistent Library of Congress system in place, but supplement it in an ad hoc way. Best sellers to be rented out to patrons may be placed on a separate shelf; very rare, pornographic, or expensive books may be locked away from general viewing at the discretion of the local librarian. Thus, the books are moved, without being formally reclassified, yet carry an additional functional system in their physical placement. (Bowker and Star, 11)

The work of making, maintaining, and analyzing classification systems is richly textured. It is one of the central kinds of work of modernity, including science and medicine. It is, we argue, central to social life. (Bowker and Star, 13)

… one medical specialty sees cancer as a localized phenomenon to be cut out and stopped from spreading, another sees it as a disorder of the whole immune system that merely manifests in one location or another. The implications for both treatment and classification differ. (Bowker and Star, 19)

Information infrastructure is a tricky thing to analyze. Good, usable systems disappear almost by definition. The easier they are to use, the harder they are to see. As well, most of the time, the bigger they are, the harder they are to see. … as many layers of technology accrue and expand over space and time. Systems of classification (and of standardization) form a juncture of social organization, moral order, and layers of technical integration. Each subsystem inherits, increasingly as it scales up, the inertia of the installed base of systems that have come before. (Bowker and Star, 33)

[Infrastructural] inversion is a struggle against the tendency of infrastructure to disappear (except when breaking down). It means learning to look closely at technologies and arrangements that, by design and by habit, tend to fade into the woodwork (sometimes literally!). (Bowker and Star, 34)

Infrastructural inversion means recognizing the depths of interdependence of technical networks and standards, on the one hand, and the real work of politics and knowledge production on the other. It foregrounds these normally invisible Lilliputian threads and furthermore gives them casual prominence in many areas usually attributed to heroic actors, social movements, or cultural mores. The inversion is similar to the arguments made by Becker (1982) in his book Art Worlds. Most history and social analysis of art has neglected the details of infrastructure within which communities of artistic practice emerge. Becker’s inversion examines the conventions and constraints of the material artistic infrastructure and its ramifications. For example, the convention of musical concerts lasting about three hours ramifies throughout the producing organization. Parking attendants, unions, ticket takers, and theater rentals are arranged in cascading dependence on this interval of time. An eight-hour musical piece, which is occasionally written, means rearranging all of these expectations, which in turn is so expensive that such productions are rare. Or paintings are about the size, usually, that will hang comfortably on a wall. They are also the size that fits rolls of canvas, the skills of framers, and the very doorways of museums and galleries. These constraints are mutable only at great cost, and artists must always consider them before violating them. (Bowker and Star, 34, 36)

What is needed is a sense of the topography of all of the arrangements: Are they colliding, coextensive, gappy, or orthogonal? One way to get at these questions is to take quite literally the kinds of metaphors that people use when describing their experience of organizations, bureaucracies, and information systems … (Bowker and Star, 40)

The third methodological theme concerns the past as indeterminate. We are constantly revising our knowledge of the past in light of new developments in the present. This is not a new idea to historiography or to biography. We change our resumes as we require new skills to appear like smooth, planned paths of development, even if the change had been unexpected or undesired. When we become members of new social worlds, we often retell our life stories in new terminology. A common example of this is a religious conversion where the past is retold as exemplifying errors, sinning, and repentance. Or when one comes out as gay or lesbian, childhood behaviors and teenage crushes become indicators of early inklings of sexual choice. (Bowker and Star, 40)

At wider levels of scale, these revisions also mean the introduction of new voices—many possible kinds of interpretations of categories, texts and artifacts. Multiple voices and silences are represented in any scheme that attempts to sort out the world. No one classification organizes reality for everyone—for example, the red light, yellow light, green light traffic light distinctions don’t work for blind people (who need sound coding). In looking to classification schemes as ways of ordering the past, it is easy to forget those who have been overlooked in this way. Thus, the indeterminacy of the past implies recovering multivocality; it also means understanding how standard narratives that appear universal have been constructed. (Bowker and Star, 41)

There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another—formal or informal, hierarchical or not. Take the apparently unproblematic statement: “In 1640, the English revolution occurred; this led to a twenty-year period in which the English had no monarchy.” The classifications involved here, all problematic, include the following:
The current segmentation of time into days, months, and years. Accounts of the English revolution generally use Gregorian calendar, which was adopted some 100 years later, so causing translation with contemporary documents.
The classification of peoples into English, Irish, Scots, French, and so on. These designations were by no means clear at the time; the whole discourse of “national genius” or character only arose in the nineteenth century.
The classification of events into revolutions, reforms, revolts, rebellions, and so forth … . There was no concept of “revolution” at the time; our current conception is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx.
What do we classify as being a “monarchy?” There is a strong historiographical tradition that says that Oliver Cromwell was a monarch—he walked, talked, and acted like one after all. Under this view, there is no hiatus at all in this English institution; rather a usurper took the throne. (Bowker and Star: 41)

Social Movements, Street Protests and Engaged Activism: Additional Resources

Building an educational/informational/inspirational online archive of alternative/independent/non-profit sources for the audience for our presentation on Monday--suggestions/comment are appreciated. Of course this list will reflect our perspectives and interests.

Aaaarg

Adbusters: The Journal of the Mental Environment

Advocacy 2.0 Guide: Tools for Digital Advocacy

AK Press

American Dissidents (Bill Moyers Journal)

Anti-Capital Projects

Appalshop

Bill Moyers Journal (PBS)

Blog for a Cause!: The Global Voices Guide of Blog Advocacy

Brave New Films

Brian Martin

Class Warfare

Common Dreams

Continental Drift

CounterPunch

Creative Commons

Crimethinc.: Ex-Workers Collective

Dialogic

Democracy Now

Documentary is Never Neutral

Doug Henwood (Left Business Observer)

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Defending Freedom in the Digital World

FAIR: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

The Fourth World War (USA: Rick Rowley, 2003)

Framing Reality: Language, Rhetoric, Images, Concepts

Framing Science

Free Documentaries

Frontline (PBS: Documentary Archive 1983 - 2009)

Future of Music Coalition: Education, Research, and Advocacy for Musicians

Glenn Greenwald

Global Activism (Worldview)

Global Voices Advocacy

Global Voices Online

History Is a Weapon

Howard Zinn

The Hub: See it. Film it. Change it.

Human Rights Watch

Indy Media

Infoshop: Unthinking Respect for Authority Is the Greatest Enemy of Truth

The Institute for Anarchist Studies: Promoting Critical Scholarship, Exploring Social Domination and Reconstructive Visions of a Free Society

Interactivist Info Exchange

Inter Press Service (IPS)

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC)

Kritik: Theory, Culture, Politics (University of Illinois)

Left Business Observer

Libcom

Media Education Foundation: Documentary Films/Challenging Media

Media Matters with Bob McChesney

Monthly Review Press

Naomi Klein

New Left Review

Noam Chomsky

No Logo: Brands, Globalization and Resistance (USA: Sut Jhally, 2003: based on Naomi Klein's book)

North of Center (Downtown Lexington's Independent Newspaper: articles posted online)

On the Media (WNYC)

Open Culture

Pittsburgh Indy Media: G20 Reports

The Politics of Culture (KCRW)

PR Watch (Center for Media and Democracy)

Rising Voices: Helping the Global Population Join the Global Conversation

Scarlateen: Sex Ed For the Real World

Seeing Red Radio

Socialist Worker

SourceWatch: Your Guide to the Names Behind the News (Center for Media and Democracy)

This Is What Democracy Looks Like (USA: Jill Friedberg and Rick Rowley, 2000)

TruthDig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (The United Nations)

Witness: Using Video and Online Technologies to Open the Eyes of the World to Human Rights Violations

The Wobblies (Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, 1979)

Worldview (WBEZ)

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States.

Social Movements, Street Protests and Engaged Activism: Setting the Tone for a Presentation

Preparing a lecture/presentation on the continuing importance of social movements, street protests and engaged activism. So collecting good videos/music to set the tone as the audience gathers in the auditorium and as they leave... and, as always, suggestions are appreciated:


(recommend turning down the volume and just looking at the slide show)


Abu-Jamal, Mumia. Empire of Fear.

Adbusters. Brand Spangled Banner.

---. The Product Is You (1999)

The Coup. Riding the Fence.

Def, Mos. Reads Malcom X's "Message to the Grass Roots". (Voices of the People's History of the United States ed. Anthony Arnove and Howard Zinn. (November 9, 2006)

Difranco, Ani and Utah Phillips. Anarchy.

---. The Most Dangerous Woman.

Flobot. Anne Braden. Fight With Tools

---. Mayday. Fight With Tools

---. Rise. Fight With Tools

---. Stand Up. Fight With Tools

---> There Is a War Going On For Your Mind. Fight With Tools

---. We Are Winning. Fight With Tools

Free Range Studios. Consumption. Ch. 5 of The Story of Stuff. (2007)

Lennon, John. Power to the People.

---. Working Class Hero.

Petric, Faith. You Ain't Done Nothing If You Ain't Been Called a Red. (With images of the 2009 G20 Conference and Protests in Pittsburgh, PA)

Phillips, Utah. Direct Action.

Public Enemy. Fight the Power.

Ruffalo, Mark. Reads Eugene Debs' "Canton, Ohio" Speech. (Voices of the People's History of the United States ed. Anthony Arnove and Howard Zinn. (All Saints Church in Pasadena, CA on Feb 1, 2007)

---. Reading from Henry David Thoreau's 1849. (Voices of the People's History of the United States ed. Anthony Arnove and Howard Zinn. (All Saints Church in Pasadena, CA on Feb 1, 2007)

Seeger, Pete. What Did You Learn In School Today.

---. Which Side Are You On.

Vedder, Eddie, et al. Masters of War. (2006)

Walker, Alice. Reading Sojourner Truth (Voices of the People's History of the United States ed. Anthony Arnove and Howard Zinn. (Berkeley, CA: November 11, 2006).

Williams, Saul. List of Demands.

Williams, Saul and DJ Spooky. Not In Our Name. Live Without Dead Time (Adbusters)

Zinn, Howard. The People Speak (Trailer for the Upcoming Documentary)

Open Culture: free cultural & educational media on the web

Great online resource:

Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best cultural and educational media. He finds the books you want, the classes you need, and plenty of enlightenment in between.

Open Culture

AAAARG

AAAARG (you know you are curious ;)