Happy Thanksgiving!

I know I use this blog a lot more to talk about what's wrong than what's right; maybe that's human nature, or maybe it's just mine. I tend to belong to the "if nobody points out it's broken, how can we fix it?" school of thought, which can be very useful. But too much focus on the negatives can bring you down and make you lose track of what's going right.

And, really, there's an awful lot that's going right. Most on my mind: I'm poised to enter a profession that is dynamic and interesting and has so much going on that it's hard to choose where to focus. ("It's hard to choose" looks a little complainy, but I really don't think having four or five totally separate areas I'd be thrilled to work on is a bad thing.)

I also live in a great city-town (Pittsburgh is this hybrid thing that's neither city nor town), and when I sit back and take the time to reflect, my little heart is warmed thinking about the new and old friends I have here. I really like these people and am happy to have them in my life. My farther-away friends make me both sad and happy to think about; I miss them, but I'm so proud and happy to call them my friends. And for all the time spent separated, the reunions are all the more joyous.

I have a partner who loves me and whom I love back, three mischievous pets (and two frogs--no mischief there), a warm and comfortable place to live, a cup of coffee in front of me, and a Thanksgiving dinner at my friends' warm and inviting house to look forward to this afternoon. I also have a pretty good shot at straight A's (or at least A-minuses) this semester, a part-time job that I like and that will help me get full-time employment before long, a fully-functional computer with all the bells and whistles I need, new vanilla-smelling soap for my shower, and several different types of purple pens.

And my bronchitis is mostly gone. I can breathe, and it is wonderful.

It's kind of a nice feeling, making lists of what's right in one's world. (This list isn't comprehensive. I've got a couple of chickens I choose not to count out loud yet.) I encourage you all to do the same, to yourself or in your blog or wherever seems best. And have a happy Thanksgiving!

[2670] Last reading & muddy point

So, this "keeping my [assigned] notes in my real blog (instead of starting a new blog just for that purpose)" thing has been an experiment, and it's not going to happen again. Should I have another instructor who makes the same kind of assignment--keep reading notes and questions about the course in a blog--I'll probably make a new blog just for that. Probably. I mean, it's been good to have my notes up and to be able to see and comment on others' notes; it's a good idea, a useful thing, and something more professors should do. I just kind of think I've bored the few regular readers I have with these commentaries. Separating it out would have been the right way to go.

That said, here are some thoughts on the readings for week 13. I'm glad to have a term for something that's come up so much in discussions this semester: "patent thickets--the fear that some advance will tread on pre-existing patents, of which the innovator may not even be aware." (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Intellectual Property Rights and Wrongs)

Stiglitz made several good points, including that open source shows IP protection is not necessarily a prerequisite for the creation of valuable products. And his point about giving someone a monopoly, even temporarily, leading to a lack of innovation is clearly worth examining. I didn't know about the Wright brothers and Curtis brothers and their forced patent pool, but I'm probably going to bring that up whenever I want to fight about copyright, in the future.

Moving on to Clifford Lynch's "Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries," I don't know about this idea of the future of libraries being "too important to be left to librarians." That's nonsense. Librarians are precisely the right people to handle this--if you can get ones who are in it for the public good over their own job security, anyway.

I'm interested that he thinks we're out of interesting research topics, with respect to digital libraries. Really?

Muddiest Point: I don't have one this week.

Management -- Level up!

I am, for all intents and purposes (give or take a moderated post to a discussion board or three), done with LIS 2700, Pitt's not-so-briefly-named "Managing Libraries & Information Systems & Services." I have a "management portfolio" to show for it--an environmental scan, needs assessment, budget, staffing plan, and business plan, done as part of a group of five people--as well as a grant proposal. Neither's going on my webspace, because I ganked and modified a real university's logo to make the portfolio beautiful, and the grant proposal is for a real, live library. But if you're an employer who'd like to see whether or not I can produce a professional-looking document, send me an e-mail or leave a comment with your contact information, and I will happily provide you with one or both (pending permission, on the grant proposal).

I'm also pretty much entirely finished with LIS 2001, Organizing Information. I'm awfully sad to see that class go; it's been truly enjoyable. I don't have much I'm inclined to display from that class (I was very conversational in my writing style for those assignments), but I'll happily tell you all about the differences between MODS and Dublin Core, if you're interested in hearing about that. I even have a presentation, with image macros and a crosswalk.

(Yes, I used the word "ganked" in something an employer might see. This is, first and foremost, a blog. I imagine employers keep that in mind.)

[2670] Muddiest Point & Reading Commentary

Muddy Point: You didn't seem to believe that having a single, unified interface to the digital libraries of the world would be a good thing. I'm curious about that and wonder if you could talk more about why not.

Reading: I really just skimmed briefly this week, I'll be honest. Which is sad: security has always been something that's interested me. And the problem of access versus ownership is extremely interesting--it's something I feel pretty strongly about. Economics, on the other hand, bores me to tears.

A little essay I cooked up

I've been pretty bad about posting my class essays up here, for a number of reasons. One of the big ones is that they are so specific to the questions, and I make kind of lazy references to books that I don't expect everyone on my blogroll to have read. (Let's be honest--I haven't read all of them. Four books in a week? Really? With a full course schedule and a part-time job? Hah, right.)

In this case, I just use articles, most of which are worth your time to check out, and for good measure [and because I refer directly to it], I am going to post the question, as well. It's still a little cramped, I think, because I had to get it in under 275 words (it's 271). Anyway, enjoy. And comment. And let's discuss. (And sorry for a second post in a day!) And, yes, you could argue that I ignored half the question, but I am actually pretty comfortable with that; knowing my professor, I suspect most of the question was a red herring.

Question:
In the United States, copyright law promotes the public good and protects the exclusive limited rights of copyright holders, in that order. If the copyright law fails to protect the rights of copyright holders adequately, how is the public good affected? Would it be better or worse if the United States adopted the standard for copyright protection in the rest of the industrialized world, whereby the primary purpose of such statutes is to protect the rights and interests of copyright holders?

Answer:
I believe the change referred to in the last sentence is already occurring--and has been for twenty years. Copyright law was written to prevent corporations from reproducing works without permission--something they had the tools to do--in the interest of encouraging innovation by making it profitable. However, the advent of consumer technologies that could make copies, then the Internet, has effectively put the same tools into the hands of individuals, making copyright law into a seriously flawed and poorly patched joke (Lessig). In 1982 Jack Valenti, a lobbyist for the film industry, compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler in front of Congress (Frel and michael). Clearly, this comparison is overblown; in fact, the film industry saw gains from this technology; it makes over $25 billion per year from videotapes and DVDs now (Frel).

Nevertheless, the same logic continues to stream out from their lobbyists, leading most recently to the PRO-IP Act, which "relaxes the standards under which extended prison terms of up to ten years can be given to repeat felony copyright infringers" (Ehmke). Just for comparison, the minimum prison term for rape in Pennsylvania is 4 years (McGill); yes, one could serve more time for copying a CD than for brutally attacking another person. I fail to see how this is "in the public interest."

I'm out of words but have much more to say. So, I would like to point you to an article by Cory Doctorow, which claims that what is at stake in the fight against draconian IP laws is nothing less than our culture itself: http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/11/cory-doctorow-why-i-copyfight.html. Please give it a read. He's right.

Works cited:

Ehmke, A. "Pro-IP Act Signed into Law." Haynes and Boone's News Room. Posted October 15, 2008. Available online: http://www.haynesboone.com/pro-ip-act-signed-into-law-10-15-2008/ Accessed November 20, 2008.

Frel, J. "The Revolution Will Be Downloaded." AlterNet. Posted April 20, 2005. Available online: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21817/. Accessed Nov 20, 2008.

Lessig, Lawrence. Speech: "The Internet at the Crossroads." The Politics of Code - Shaping the Future of the Next Internet, Oxford Internet Institute, 2003.

McGill, A. "Cluck sentenced to four years in prison." The Daily Collegian Online. Posted August 23, 2007. Available online: http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2007/08/23/cluck_sentenced_to_four_years.aspx Accessed November 20, 2008.

michael. "Valenti's "Boston Strangler" Testimony." Slashdot. Posted on Fri May 31, 2002 03:12 PM. Available online: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/31/1622232.

West, J. "little pieces of things that might interest you." librarian.net. Posted November 20, 2008. Available online: http://www.librarian.net/stax/2561/little-pieces-of-things-that-might-interest-you/

A quote I ran into while I was looking for best practices on citing Slashdot (which is something I do tend to avoid): "... citing slashdot on patent issues is like citing Soviet propaganda to find out about the US Constitution." --FallLine, , posted to Slashdot on Monday January 15 2007.

Oh noes!

I've discovered a real problem, folks: most of the people I really want to work with--whose books, ideas, blogs, and podcasts have most influenced my thinking over this semester and who I think have the greatest chance of effecting real change in technology policies and practices (if anybody would just listen to them)--are pretty much all lawyers. (Why are lawyers the ones writing all of these books? Why isn't it librarians? I think this is something worth discussing and would love to hear from some library-related folk why they think we're falling so short on this stuff!)

I just don't know that they want an engineer-turned-librarian following them around all the time, no matter how smart or devoted to their various causes I might be, since they all work in law-related organizations--with quite a lot of overlap between them, if you look at the whole timeline. I also don't think I've got the wherewithal to go to school for three more years, at $100k+ a year, to then end up working with them and the EFF and never paying off my loans. It took some soul-searching to go from engineering to library science and to take on the loans I have. Also, I am really kind of pondering a PhD in LIS, instead, though the question of "now or later?" is still very up in the air--and very dependent on who has the coolest/best/most socially relevant projects for me to work on next year.

(A post to come soon: I identify people within the library field who are also working on interesting and relevant things, of similar importance, in a very different way. I've got a couple, already.)

Stopping the OCLC Power Grab

I found out about this by way of librarian.net and want to pass it along to anyone who might be interested.

By way of explanation: OCLC, the not-for-profit that provides library services around the world, has gone too far. Originally, it was a library collaborative -- one library could catalog a book, upload it to OCLC, and then other libraries could save time by reusing the catalog information. But as the price of such technology has fallen, its prices have risen. It charges membership fees, record retrieval fees, user support fees, and fees for all sorts of additional services. But now it wants to set the terms of use for every library record ever retrieved through OCLC, so that it can maintain its monopoly in the field. In a very real sense, they're trying to steal our libraries. We have to make them stop -- please join me in signing the petition "Stop the OCLC powergrab!" You can do so right now at http://watchdog.net/c/stop-oclc

For more information, see this wiki page: OCLC Policy Change.

[2670] Week 11 Reading & Muddiest Point

Arms is at it again. (It seems like the Digital Library World has between three and five really prolific authors and then a bunch of people who wrote one or two articles.) For the most part, his article rung the "Duh" bell: of course users would prefer to have one interface and see "searching" as a thing they should be able to do from one place, namely their desks. Even I figured this out, and I'm just starting out studying this stuff. It bothers me that individual publishers put "branding" above ease of use, in terms of database subscriptions, and if digital library creators are doing the same thing, then shame on them. OAI-PMH/Z39.50 (yes, I know they're different) is imperfect, and we all clearly must use different metadata standards (I'm only half sarcastic, I guess), but we still need to think a lot more about the larger user community and a lot less about making things "our own."

One more point about Arms, specifically. He says "Google Scholar shows somewhat the same myopic viewpoint." What now? I'm not feigning ignorance, here; I'm honestly unclear what he's talking about.

As far as the topic of this week's readings goes, generally, I know that communities are a big part of the definition of Digital Libraries. I think maybe that gets expanded too far, though. I think there needs to be a community interested in a particular subject, in order to make the work of making the digital library worthwhile, but I also think that you need to keep an eye on the grander picture. Once you've justified building the library, and once you've designed it so that the people whose use justifies its existence can, you know, use it, you then need to make it available to the broader community of potential users. Your individual community might dry up, but the library is already there and potentially usable by millions of people. So do it right.

Muddiest Point: I, too, would support the use of some class time to teach us how to use Greenstone. I figured out how to install it on my computer, but its interface isn't exactly intuitive.

I still hate Greenstone, but I got it to run

For folks in 2670, I hope this helps. For folks outside of 2670, I recommend against using Greenstone Digital Library software, but if you find that you have to, I hope this helps you install it, at least for local use.

If I find any good tricks for using Greenstone, after it's installed, I'll share those, as well. I hope my classmates will do the same. :)

Assuming the moon's alignment with Venus was not what did it, here's how I got Greenstone to run:

1) I installed VMWare Fusion on my Mac. (This is unnecessary if you already have Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2. Skip to step 3 in that case.)

2) I installed Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2. No, XP x64 won't do it; I tried.

(Steps 1 and 2 were necessary because, to be blunt, I refuse to put this buggy software on the native operating system of my only computer. If something goes horribly wrong in my VM, I can just blow it away, without losing important data.) Please note: I did the rest of these steps before installing anything else on my Windows VM, including Firefox or Office or anything; I can't promise that this will work with anything other than IE 6, or in any order other than the one I give below; given how many times I went through failed installs, I've developed a little bit of irrational superstition about the order of operations...

3) I downloaded and installed Java Virtual Machine on my computer.

4) I downloaded and installed Java JDK, specifically JDK 6 Update 10 with Java EE. There's some weirdness with Java's download manager software, but don't worry overmuch. Just do what it tells you to do.

5) I downloaded and installed ActivePerl. I did what it told me to do and was rewarded with cute lizard icons and a properly-defined Perl PATH.

6) I downloaded and installed ImageMagick, specifically ImageMagick-6.4.5-5-Q16-windows-dll.exe. Choose only the default options; don't add more. Seriously.

7) I installed Greenstone, Windows Distribution (Latest). I went with all the defaults, including "Local" rather than "Web."

8) Here's where it gets a little tricky. Perl correctly sets its own path to what Greenstone Librarian Interface expects, but Java does not, for some reason. (I guess first try running Greenstone Librarian Interface. If it works, you don't have to do this step. It didn't work for me, so here's what I did to fix it.)

Go to C:\Program Files\Greenstone\gli, and right-click on gli.bat (it is an icon that looks like a window with a cog in it). Choose Edit. Scroll down to the three lines that look like this:

:findJava
:: ---- Check Java Exists ----
set JAVAPATH=

Now, go find java.exe. On my computer, it's in C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin. Paste that path in (yours, not mine, though they are probably the same); on my machine, the above now says

:findJava
:: ---- Check Java Exists ----
set JAVAPATH=C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin

Close the file, and click "Yes" when it asks if you want to save. Now Greenstone should run just fine. Ideally.

Musings on Next Semester

So, I picked my classes:

LIS 2002: Retrieving Information (required core course, blended format)
LIS 2405: Intro to Cataloging and Classification (online only course)
LIS 2690: Information Visualization (blended format)
LIS 2879: Academic Librarianship (blended format)

You'll notice two things about them. One, it's a pretty fun and interesting set of things to study. Two, everything is online, or at the very least, blended.

I'll be honest: this upsets me. I dropped everything to move to Pittsburgh for this degree. More than that, Dale dropped everything and took a job he doesn't like as much as the job he had in Virginia, to move to Pittsburgh, so I could get this degree. Which is made up almost entirely of online courses. I am paying through the nose for this degree, and yet, I am looking at another semester of fighting the discussion boards in our sub-par distance education software to have artificial "conversations" for the sole purpose of making the off-campus students feel that they're part of the community--a misguided effort, to be sure, as they are no more fans of the discussion boards than we are. ... I hope I'm wrong and all of next semester's professors will understand that the enforced-online-discussion model wastes students' time, brings down the level and the sincerity of discourse, and ultimately decreases the value of the degree we are earning.

I was going to muse/rant some more, but I have some digital library software I am trying desperately to learn to use (getting it to run would be a start--curse you, Greenstone!), before I go to bed tonight. Tomorrow and Sunday, I'll be on the road, attending a wedding. (Yay, weddings!)

Hope

I know we're all just about ready to stop talking about the election (for various reasons), but history was made in more than one way last night, and I'm glad to know that for every African American child who now knows that the highest office in the US could one day be his (the post that's linked there is beautiful), there is also a little girl who is that much closer to serving as a Senator or Representative. That's right, a the new US Senate and House of Representatives will both have record-breaking numbers of women serving (link goes to PDF report).

It's a good day to be an American.

[2670] Week 10 Reading & Muddiest Point

While Kling's paper brings up some good points, its obvious datedness (seriously, Mosaic? information superhighway?) gets distracting. I think it does a better job of showing where we were than where we ought to be going--unless Dr. He's point in giving us this to read is to say "we really haven't made much progress." That would be unfortunate.

Saracevic raises the point that not much is being done, as far as evaluation of digital libraries goes. Or, more to the point, a lot of work is being done on how digital libraries might be evaluated, but the few people who are (or were, as of 2004) doing the evaluation are not really utilizing that work. The field of digital library evaluation sounds kind of scattered and hapless.

As far as the other articles/chapters (which I can't link, either because the link to what we were supposed to read is broken, or because the resources are on Courseweb only), they seem to discuss usability in terms I'm more familiar with (and, I'll be honest, more interested in). They point to websites and operating systems and say "See, this is well-done," and "See, this isn't." As a particularly grumpy web user, I appreciate any effort to improve usability in websites.

Muddiest Point: I didn't have one from last lecture, which I think I've already said. I do want to check and make sure I heard Dr. He right: we get midterm grades in two weeks? (Not trying to rush anyone, just to make sure my hearing's good. :)) Thanks!