An Interesting Thing Happened on the Internet

Yesterday, somebody pointed me to a FriendFeed thread in which an artist and a FriendFeed user were working through issues of intellectual property and Internet etiquette.

The FriendFeed user, Kol, had bookmarked an image that he found on a site that allows artists to share their work with each other. In typical FriendFeed fashion, this bookmark appeared in FriendFeed with a thumbnail of the image he had bookmarked and with places for other FriendFeed users to comment on, "like," or re-share the bookmark and its related thumbnail image with their own sets of FriendFeed friends. The artist objected strenuously (and not at all politely) to the fact that this thumbnail appeared on FriendFeed. Kol and other FriendFeed users tried explaining that Kol had not, in fact, infringed on the artist's rights by bookmarking her image since thumbnails do not violate copyright and since the image was licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (though the artist has since removed that license). In short, the artist was well within her rights to ask (politely) to have her image removed from FriendFeed as a matter of courtesy, but she was probably not within her rights to accuse the original poster of wrong-doing. That's the sanitized version, at least, which I reproduced here at some length because of difficulties with the original material.*

So, except for the attendant drama, the issues seem to be garden-variety intellectual property confusion. But all the drama involved in this particular exchange was actually kind of illuminating.

First, it reminded me that as an information consumer, I'm used to the feelings of frustration involved in finding out that I can't freely use other people's stuff however I want to even if I cite my sources. I run up against the flip-side of these frustrations only very rarely, however, and they're good to bear in mind. I happily slap Creative Commons licenses on lots of the stuff I produce, but I remember all too well the first time I found my work being reproduced and shared in a way that I didn't particularly appreciate but that fell squarely within the parameters of the license I'd chosen. There's nothing like working up a good head of righteous indignation only to remember that they're doing exactly what I said they could do and no more.

This particular discussion might also be less straight-forward than it at first appeared. Licenses always trump copyright, and the original image** has license-like language attached to it that prohibits "use" of the work outside of a specific community. The artist clearly thought that this applied to bookmarking and sharing via FriendFeed, though that's not at all clear from the term "use." Kol either didn't read those instructions, or read them but didn't think they applied to bookmarking, or read them but didn't think they constituted a license. (To be fair, I'm not completely sure they are a license, either, but I think good etiquette would be to assume that they do.) And where does all of this leave the artist's fans? If they want to share bookmarks with other fans or potential fans, they can't turn off the "suck in a thumbnail" feature of these social networks. The only way that gets turned off is if the originating site has lock-down features like Flickr does for the images its users make private.

Little did Kol know when he bookmarked this image that he'd bring down the wrath of the artist, spark a huge debate on FriendFeed (and a ton of re-shares of Kol's post), and set this librarian to musing about the incredibly intertangled worlds of intellectual property, etiquette, and the Internet.

* I don't like talking about things without linking to them, but this one has me on the fence for two reason: 1) the link may die suddenly since there was a promise to delete the thread as soon as someone from FriendFeed had seen and responded to the original poster, and 2) the language in this thread is decidedly not safe for work, or for kids, or for me. Still want to see it? Here you go. [Edit: yep, the original post is gone now.] I may or may not screen-grab the post for posterity. I haven't decided yet if that's fair to all involved, or if I want to have that kind of language saved anywhere associated with me. Call me a prude, if you want, but them's my boundaries and it's up to me if I want to cross them.

** I'm aware that by linking to that image, the artist may find my post, so I'll just say right up front that while I welcome constructive comments and discussion, I reserve the right to delete any crude or abusive comments. And I get to decide what constitutes "crude" or "abusive."

Well Hello, Blog

Yesterday, I had reason to point someone toward a couple of old blog posts I'd written. Popping over here to collect the links brought me up against a sobering realization, though: I posted once last month. Once. And that was a post I'd outlined weeks ahead of time. I've had dry spells before, but never like this.

It crossed my mind that maybe I should just put this thing out of its misery, but I don't think I'm ready to follow in CavLec's footsteps yet. So here I am again, and here's a bit of what I've been up to since last I thought much about blogging.

We had an unusually busy Spring term at Carleton. Budgetary adventures, a new initiative to archive digital versions of all senior capstone projects, revising our strategic plan, and some internal restructuring took up a lot of time and brain space.

My sister got married, my cousin got married, and my youngest brother graduated from college (with honors!), all in the space of a month.

Then I took two weeks off of work to do as much of Nothing At All as I could. In case you missed it, that was TWO WHOLE WEEKS off. In a row. Bliss. During that time, I became a big fan of sitting on the porch with a book, a laptop, and some iced tea. (In fact, I'm reprising my role as a porch-sitter right now, thanks to early observance of Independence Day.) Coming back to work was kind of a shock to the system after that, let me tell you.

It's been a weird few months in which many individual good things happened but the whole felt kind of awful. I was tired. I am tired. But I think things are starting to turn around. And while I'm not sure how frequently I'll post or what I'll write about, it's nice to see this space sitting here and waiting for me.

Four Years

Since the age of 14, I've been measuring my life in four-year increments. Each increment had its own challenge, and each one culminated in its own major life transition. But now, for the first time in my life, I'm not going through a major life transition after 4 years, and I'm not reaching toward some tantalizing, terrifying, and fascinating goal four years distant

First there was high school. I'd decided to continue being home schooled, which terrified me. How could I be sure that I'd learn enough to get into college if I stayed home? I couldn't. So I learned absolutely as much as I could, fueled by a deep smoldering panic that I'd be horribly under-prepared for college. As it turns out, I wasn't under-prepared. So I graduated from high school and went to college.

Then there was college. That terrified me. How could I possibly both figure out what I wanted to do with The Rest Of My Life (in my head that phrase was always in capital letters) and also learn enough to do whatever-that-was in only four years? As it turns out, I didn't. And as it turns out, this is normal. So I graduated from college and, since I still didn't quite know what I wanted to do for The Rest Of My Life, I went to grad school.

Grad school terrified me. All these smart people, all this work, all this pressure. I had no idea how I'd make it through the reading assignments, let alone the term papers that were twice as long as any I'd written before (with the exception of my college senior thesis). After two years of that, I'd learned enough to decide that English Professor was not going to be my title for The Rest Of My Life, so I skipped out with a masters and moved over to the School of Library and Information Science... which terrified me for a whole different set of reasons. The classes didn't inspire me, and I'd never worked in a library, so I wondered what people did beyond sit at a desk and answer questions all day, which seemed like it could be unendingly dull. But just as I was going to quit and go back to the English Professor idea (the program had said I could come back any time), I got a job in a library and decided that this might suit me after all. As it turns out, it does suit me. So, after 2 years in English and 2 years in library school, I left graduate school and started my first job.

This Carleton job terrified me, so when I took it I promised myself that it need only be for four years. (After that, I planned to find a job closer to my family.) It was a job full of all kinds of opportunity, but also all kinds of responsibility. The people here were wonderful, but I worried that I'd be the weak link in their exhilarating, intense, and creative chain. As it turns out, our individual strengths and weaknesses seem to complement each other pretty well, so the job quickly grew to become my dream job. And so, as it turns out, I'm not looking for a job after my allotted four years.

And now, on this, the anniversary of the day I started here, I feel nearly qualified to hold the position I have. I've done a lot (started this blog, taught dozens of classes, met with hundreds of students, given conference talks, written articles and a book chapter). I've learned to negotiate tricky situations with at least outward confidence. And I've made fast friends for whom I'm continually grateful. These friends have talked me into confidence I'd never have found on my own, and they've talked me down when things seemed to be too much to handle. If it takes a village to raise a child, it apparently takes a sizable chunk of the internet and fair few face-to-face friends to raise a librarian, or at least this librarian.

I wonder what the next four years hold.

P.S. If 4 years seems about long enough to train up a librarian, I wonder how people like presidents feel.

Making FriendFeed Look the Way I Want It To

I interrupt your regularly scheduled library-related thinking to bring you a brief note about FriendFeed. It recently changed its look rather significantly, and a few of us felt a little claustrophobic every time we looked at it. Luckily, if you're running Firefox you can install Stylish, which lets you modify a site's CSS. Once you install that, you need one or more of the following:

1. Enough knowledge of CSS to modify the site as you wish
2. Friends who know enough CSS to do that for you
3. The Internet, where you can find ready-made styles like this one

I know enough CSS to break things or tinker mildly with things that already exist, and I have friends who put up with my requests for help and whose code I steal mercilessly (hi Steve), and I have the Internet. So I started with this style, modified it to make it look more the way I wanted, begged for help making it look even more the way I wanted, and now have a small suite of style options (which you can copy and paste into new Stylish styles):

1. For when I'm in friend mode, at home: this cleaned up version. (last updated 5/29/2009)
   
2. For when I'm in work mode and really just want text to skim: this stripped down version that gets rid of user icons. (last updated 5/29/2009)
3. And since I'm not a very picture-oriented person, it seems: a style that makes all posted images into teensy thumbnails that I can click on to view in their larger sizes when I want to.
   

I have (1) and (3) running together at home, and I have (2) and (3) running at work.

Lest you think I'm at all good at this, I should point out that my tweaks were incredibly minor. Steve Lawson did the big stuff (by which I mean shrinking images to thumbnails, highlighting direct messages, and removing user icons). You'll also notice, if you look carefully at the code, that I just commented out portions of the original code, so you can restore that stuff and tweak it if you want.

A couple of other people really liked seeing which services were responsible for individual FriendFeed posts (like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc). If you're like them, try this Greasemonky script (after installing Greasemonkey, of course).

Just When I Thought Life Needed a Little Spicing Up...

... Elsevier delivered for me. Ah, the sweet smell of fraud in the evening.

Tuesday, I heard that they'd (oops) published a fake journal under a fake imprint. Now they've admitted it, but not before the LSW had sunk its teeth in and decided that the upcoming zine could be hilariously renamed The Australasian Journal of Library Science (complete with some of the most pesky problems any journal could ever have... seriously, go read the thread behind that link), and that Elsevier could perhaps benefit from some customized Cod of Ethics merch.

Now we're up to six fake journals (sorry for the registration required by that link, but it's free), and Dorothea has contributed some less hilarious, more to-the-point commentary.

If I were writing the "scenes from next week's show" for this particular drama, it'd include revelations that their peer review system is run via seance, or that there's an invisible clause in their author agreements that really does sign over the authors' souls in addition to their copyrights. But since I'm not in charge, all I can say is Stay Tuned!

Crazy Thought

Thinking about the things that I like about Google or about library databases in comparison with each other after my last post, I realized that library databases need crazy-easy URLs. I don't click through 2 or 3 layers of a website to get to Google. I type "goo" into my address bar, which fills in the rest, which takes me to Google. If I could type "MLA" into the address bar and get to even something as complicated as "MLAbib.csa.com," life would be easier. Sure beats my current option:
http://www.csa.com.ezproxy.carleton.edu/htbin/dbrng.cgi?username=carl&access=[gobbledygook]&db=mla-set-c&adv=1

If I could also set a cookie that would authenticate me from my own home computer, life would be even easier.

Still need to work on the seamless access to full text part of the equation, though.

I Really Wish It Were Easier

Tipping point: reached.

Up until maybe the middle of last year, it was pretty easy not to worry too much about the problems of doing "real" library research on the free web. "The kids are doing it" was a phrase that simultaneously helped us to worry about the state of information literacy in this web-ified era and to dismiss the problem as one that "the kids" would outgrow, like braces or a lisp or chicken pox, as they became better versed in scholarly research practices.

Well, it's not just the kids any more, folks. Enough journal publishers have opened up their indexing and abstracts to the free web that it's now possible (especially in some fields) to actually do "real" library research on the web. And so people are doing just that. This year, our new faculty orientation session brought questions about Google-friendly access right to our door-step in a big way, and part of this rather disorganized thread on FriendFeed brought it up again.

And yes, ideally everyone could use one nice, big, easy search mechanism to do everything from the most broad to the most narrow topic and then get instant access to the full text of whatever they find. Too bad that's impossible.

Google is more familiar and forgiving, it's faster, and there's a lot of good stuff in it (particularly if you're searching for something that hasn't had any controlled vocabulary assigned to it, yet). But currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of collocating like items based on something more robust than the author's choice in vocabulary and PageRank. Currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of allowing scholars to leverage their disciplinary vocabulary and a better job of helping novices stumble upon key vocabulary terms. Currently, disciplinary databases are the only things that can offer relief to my students who say that there are just too many false hits in everything from Google to JSTOR (free text search may be what they're used to, but they're often relieved to leave it behind as soon as they're shown controlled vocabulary).

But all that aside, neither option does the "access to full text" piece of the equation very well. Unless your library subscribes to the publisher versions of pretty much every eJournal out there (an expensive proposition) Google can't actually help you get to whole swaths of full text, and even then you'd have to be on campus or logged in to your library's proxy server or something. And even if researchers are in a disciplinary database, they'll still often have to step outside of that database to get the full text, and while a link resolver is a wonderful thing, it's still a long way from being a perfect solution to this problem. Either way this lands you at the A-Z list figuring out if we have access to the particular issue of the particular journal you want.

I wish it were easier. I wish access issues didn't make researchers jump to the conclusion that we're "hiding" stuff from Google, or that we're being unnecessarily silo-ish, or that indexing is over-rated, or that you have to do "complex" searches in library databases. I also wish that we could bringing together disciplinary databases in ways that allow easy cross-searching without giving up the time-saving specificity of disciplinary focus and vocabulary.

Right now it feels like we're balanced precariously on that tipping point with a precipice on each side.

And So They Burned It

As I drove in to work this evening the familiar voice of a piano professor here spilled out of the car speakers that generally only bring me voices of people like Steve Inskeep, Michele Norris, Scott Simon and the other body-less NPR friends that follow me through my days. She was explaining that Annea Lockwood composed an avant-garde piece in which a piano is burned. It's called "Piano Burning" (which strikes me as a not very avant-garde name for such a piece), and tonight they're performing it on campus.

Arriving on campus, there was the dilapidated piano standing alone in the middle of the Bald Spot, waiting to be burned.


Pianos I've known have always lived in warm, homey spaces, or stood in state on a stage. They've always felt like they calmly conceal the potential to thrill you tomorrow or next year or when your grandchildren come to visit. They've always promised great things for the people who can touch them with care and skill, and for the people those artists know.

This piano, though, is just sitting in the middle of its rectangle of cleared earth in the middle of a wide, blank field, hunched under the gathering clouds, and waiting to be burned. I've never seen such a starkly alone piano.

And then they burned it.

It's Been Quite A Week

Last Tuesday we hosted one of the periodic meetings of the reference and instruction librarians that work at the five Oberlin Group libraries in Minnesota. At least once a year we have a "Round Robin" session where we basically sit down, eat lunch, and then talk all afternoon about what each of our libraries are doing. We'll set a theme for the day, but the themes are broad and nobody really cares if the conversation runs off on tangents. I love these days. This time the theme was about "Looking Forward" and included discussions of everything from mobile technologies to budgets. We also learned that we had about a week to decide if we wanted to purchase LibGuides.

That same day, the steering committee for that group of librarians met to begin planning what I'm now thinking of as the Coolest Project Ever: a day-long mini-Immersion just for us. We'll meet, we'll learn, we'll teach each other pieces of the best instruction we know how to do, and we'll remember again how much we can learn from each other. I can't wait.

Wednesday was full, and neatly bookended by dentist and doctor appointments.

Thursday was a more-than-12-hour day that started with an un-fun budget meeting and finished with evening reference.

Friday I taught two classes and had two meetings before lunch, picked up Laura Crossett at the airport, made her hang out for a while so I could get a complicated research guide published, and then began the Weekend Of Fun. I have a very small handful of "best friends," and two of them spent the weekend visiting me. Martha Hardy came down from the cities and joined me and Laura in what she called The Library Camp of Iris' Living Room. Wonderful.

Monday morning, it was back to the airport and a fond farewell to Laura, followed by probably the hardest class I've ever had to teach, followed by a reference shift.

Which brings us to today. Today we got word that we have rooms and everything for MnObe Immersion, and I filled out paperwork that makes our imminent acquisition of LibGuides official! (I think that makes this the fastest library-related non-book acquisition I've ever been a part of, by the way.) I also started seeing some of the 60 students I've taught in the last 2 work-days, plus some of the students in another class that, yet again, cannot seem to make American Memory work for them. The professor and I have tried so many different ways over the last couple of years to make this particular class understand this particular resource, but for some reason it never seems to work out. I'm flummoxed.

In amongst all of this, in the last few days my cousin gave birth to a baby with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, a friend of a friend's husband killed himself, another friend's father tried in earnest to kill that friend's brother, and my cousin spent all day today waiting for her baby girl to make it through the surgery that will begin the long process of constructing a functioning heart. I was feeling a little sorry for myself last week because of over-long work days full of too many things to do. Perspective gained. I have it pretty good.

The New New OCLC

Just when you thought you'd gotten to know the new OCLC, it shakes things up again. OCLC is now in the ILS business and WorldCat Local is now free to FirstSearch subscribers.

My first thought on reading about all of this yesterday was that all those pilot WorldCat Local schools must be steamed that this is now free.

My second thought was almost equal parts pleased and worried. I'm pleased that this is yet another competitor against the current lumbering giants in the ILS market, and I like the idea that (if I understand correctly) this will add a hosted option to the ILS market. (Hosted options aren't always the best, but I like the idea of having it available as a choice for people.) On the other hand, this means that that pesky new policy on the transfer and use of OCLC records really wasn't just about protecting a bunch of member-produced data after all. There were bigger plans afoot, and these plans involved leaning even farther toward the vendor model rather than the service model. And if OCLC is a vendor rather than a service, that new policy feels even more like a land-grab rather than an effort to protect member investments.

My third thought, on further reflection, will hopefully be less nebulous and conflicted and more grounded in fact and reasoning.