copyright session @ media democracy day vancouver

November 6th, 2010 • library
Tags: al jazeera, android, apple, art, blizzard, c-32, cataloguing, cbc, copyright, copyright criminals, creative commons, documentary, funding, geof glass, hart snider, hockey night in canada, ios, law, lawyer, litigation, martha rans, mashup, media, media democracy day, movies, music, pacific cinematheque, passion, rip a remix manifesto, school, sfu, starcraft ii, tony burman, vancouver, vancouver public library, video, zed

Tony Burman from Al Jazeera English was talking at Media Democracy Day down at the Vancouver Public Library this afternoon, but after his keynote address (see my very scrappy notes) I skipped out on listening to a panel discuss the spread of Fox News style media up north and went to a panel on Copyright. After the copyright session I also went to Engaging the Resistant: Achieving Change Through Documentary and Journalism put on by Pacific Cinematheque, but it wasn’t at all what I wanted out of a session so I won’t be talking any more about it (they seemed like a neat group, just ran a session I didn’t really enjoy).

But yes, the copyright session was really interesting, and library related. There was Geof Glass – a communications PhD from SFU who specializes in the online commons, Hart Snider – a video remix artist and Martha Rans – a copyright lawyer who works with artist collectives and Creative Commons Canada.

Glass spoke about the asymmetric access to culture we have when information is owned by monopolistic companies. He talked about StarCraft II player-designed maps which now get transferred to the ownership of Blizzard, which gets to benefit monetarily from what its users are making. He talked about selling the Hockey Night in Canada theme song for millions of dollars and how it wasn’t worth that much money until people had invested parts of themselves in it. His big thing was about participation in culture and how important it is to do and not just witness.

Snider talked about the path he’s taken as a video artist and how illegal his sampling work is. He talked about how bill C-32 says that you can’t damage the integrity of what you’re sampling, but “artists have the right to say what they want.” He sort of struck me as a bit out of touch, or selfish in his concern about only what he was allowed to do, instead of caring about the wider society (or just getting on with doing his own thing). The best story was how the CBC’s lawyers had to spend 8 months trying to figure out how to show one of his videos on Zed. They eventually did by changing the show from an Entertainment show to a News show for one night. Because News shows don’t have to worry about copyright in the same way, as they’re commenting on the things that are happening.

Martha Rans talked about how as a culture we need to value artists, and that our energy would best be spent fighting cuts to the arts from government. She talked about what a lousy law C-32 was in its vagueness and it just screaming for litigation to get things sorted. That gives a big hammer to corporations, yes, but it doesn’t really deal with artists getting enough money for food and rent. She called out the media for its fearmongering about the bill by talking piracy and not separating artists and publishing corporations. She also said that Copyright Criminals was a much better documentary on copyright and culture than Rip! A Remix Manifesto because it didn’t ignore the fact that it was only through the traditional system of copyright and royalty payments that african-american artists could legally fight their way to getting paid instead of being ripped off blind by white artists and corporations. Really interesting stuff.

The easiest way to be able to do what you want to do as an artist and not worry about the law, she said (after prefacing it with saying this was not legal advice), was to not own a home or have anything for anyone to sue you for. I like that as a strategy. She also talked about how librarians have to speak up and fight for arts groups as we’re the people in charge of preserving all this culture and our silence on these issues is terrible. She told us that since our institutions are risk averse, academics need to develop backbones and stand up to commercial interests themselves.

There were a few interesting questions from the audience and a lot of anecdotes about how artists really are at the bottom of the list of who gets paid by the big publishing corporations. One guy asking about why Glass was so down on the Apple iOS store, since didn’t the Android Market provide a competitive market for people who didn’t want to play in authorized Appleland didn’t really get his question answered, which was kind of crappy. The moderator wasn’t very good at handling the crowd, but whatever.

I’m realizing that copyright is something I’m interested in. That’s what this first semester of school has been good for, giving me an idea which of these topics I actually care about and which leave me cold. Copyright gets me fired up. Bizarrely enough, cataloguing does too. Who knew?

lwb carnegie tour

November 5th, 2010 • library
Tags: accent, access, beggar, big brother, branch, branch head, cafeteria, cambie, camera, carnegie, carrall, chinatown, community centre, crooks, downtown east side, drugs, englebert humperdinck, hastings, id, librarians without borders, noncatalogued, police, randy, school, security, spanish eyes, stickup, surveillance, tour, vancouver, vancouver public library, 象棋

Librarians Without Borders’ SLAIS Student Chapter (LWB@UBC) was doing a book drive for the Carnegie library in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side this past month. We collected tubs and tubs of books and today went down to the library to give them away. The idea is that the library sets up a table outside on Fridays at 2:30 and gives books away. The library is on East Hastings street, with an alley that’s full of crazy drug happenings and such, so the idea of giving books to people is something I can get behind.

I got to chat with a couple of guys who picked up some books. One was there telling me about the books he’d bought at other places and how he was a great harmonica player who knows all the old Englebert Humperdinck songs “and not everyone can sing those! Spanish Eyes? It’s really hard!” He had a moderate Indian accent, and spoke with the same intensity my step-father does about politics or science, which was a neat bit of cognitive dissonance.

The other guy was complaining about the security cameras the police have up at that corner that can see all the way up to Cambie (which I’m not sure is possible because of the bend in Hastings; he might have meant Carrall) at such resolution that two blocks away they can read your watch. He was also worried about the chips they’re putting in babies now, and how Big Brother was coming to watch us all and lock us away if we’re crooks. “Good thing I’ll be dead before it all happens,” he said, and I managed not to talk about life-extension technologies.

There was also a guy who came up yelling “This is a stickup!” but he was just trying to be funny. I got told off for not buying a guy pizza. I said “Sorry dude” and he said “Yeah, well god bless ya anyway.” But as he walked away he got more angry and said “Maybe Satan should bless you instead.” He didn’t actually swear at me, which was pretty good.

Before hitting the street we got a tour of the community centre from the acting branch head. The Carnegie branch is a weird little branch serving a very specific community, which affects their policies in many ways. There’s a special Carnegie Library card you can get, which doesn’t require any ID. The fines are fairly flexible and while they only have three full-time staff, the part-timers who work there tend to work there a lot, because you need to develop rapport with the people, and not everyone is all over that.

Also, if I heard correctly, all of the books are non-catalogued (ie they don’t have specific representations in the VPL system and are listed basically as BOOK with a barcode). They do this because their loss-rate is so high, they’d constantly be recataloguing things as missing. This way it’s easier to reprocess books, but means they can’t search the computer to see if a book is actually there. It was interesting stuff.

Also in the building is an education centre, a very popular cafeteria, a gym, a theatre, a seniors’ centre and lots of space for people to hang out and play 象棋, Chinese chess. Because this library is also right in Chinatown. So it serves an interesting community. There are also certain barriers to access. At each of the doors there were signs saying that people must behave in a civil and proper manner inside. Randy also explained that meant they couldn’t be intoxicated or on other drugs. These are rules that come from the building being a community centre, and there’s a lot of interesting interplay between the community centre and the library aspects of the place.

I’m really glad I got the chance to go see this, and get the tour and stuff instead of just showing up one day to look around. Good job, library school.

first months of school recap

October 21st, 2010 • 1 comment library
Tags: afghanistan, assignment, canada afghanistan solidarity committee, censorship, faceted classification, google instant, librarians without borders, lwb@ubc, mlis, news, observation, powerpoint, refdesk, school, seminar, slais

Library school is going well. We’re over halfway through the term and I’ve done a few assignments and they’ve gone okay. I’m taking the “what I’ve learned is more important than the mark” approach so as not to stress out about things too badly, and it’s working out pretty well.

So far, I’ve done a news article review thingy about how Google Instant is an inconsistent censor (PDF link), an observation of reference interviews (PDF link), a seminar on censorship based on assigned readings (PDF link), a faceted classification of the performing arts (PDF link), and a PowerPoint presentation about nerd games. (I’m sorry if that last link doesn’t work for you; We had to do them in Office 2010. Here’s the page full of everyone’s not really library related presentations, if that makes it up to you.)

This weekend is going to be spent doing a bunch more stuff, but if you’re interested in what first-term MLIS assignments look like, there you go.

Also, in school related things, I’m the co-secretary of the UBC student chapter of Librarians Without Borders. Next week we’ve got a speaker coming in talking about a Library Initiative in Afghanistan, sponsored by the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee and we’ve had speakers talking about open access to data as well as building education centres in Nicaragua. I think it’s neat stuff.

book review: the curtain

October 10th, 2010 • books
Tags: agelast, art, confrontation, europe, history, jokes, kafka, milan kundera, nonfiction, novel, pretentious, review, sacrilege, school, the curtain, writing

Reading Milan Kundera essays about topics like Art and The Novel and such always makes me want to be a better writer than I am. To be a bit pretentious because that’s a way of faking yourself out into thinking that maybe you’re doing something worth a damn.

To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional – thus, not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious – is contemptible.

The Curtain is a short book-length essay about art and history and how history has no taste.

The more attentively, fixedly, one observes a reality, the better one sees that it does not correspond to people’s idea of it; under Kafka’s long gaze it is gradually revealed as empty of reason, thus non-reasonable, thus implausible.

And part of what I love about a book like this, even though it’s so European and also so snobby is seeing bits of me reflected in there, like someday I might not make something that’s a piece of shit.

For if agelasts tend to see sacrilege in every joke, it’s because every joke is a sacrilege. There is an irreconcilable incompatibility between the comical and the sacred, and we can only ask where the sacred begins and ends. Is it confined just to the Temple? Or does its domain reach further, does it also annex what are known as the great secular values: maternity, love, patriotism, human dignity?

An important book for me to read. I feel more at odds with this whole idea of being at school learning to do something that’s almost the opposite of art, but being at odds with something is good. Keeps me from being complacent.

lego and the future

October 7th, 2010 • 1 comment library
Tags: bricklink, cataloguing, classification, controlled vocabulary, description, lego, libr502, mlis, school, slais

In our classification class the other day we learned about faceted classification systems, which sounds amazingly exciting doesn’t it? I wouldn’t have thought so, except that our in-class activity was building one of these systems for organizing Lego. Which made it awesome.

I am a bit of a Lego nerd and loved the idea of building a system that would allow you to find things based on your needs at the time. If I may say so, we built a pretty good fucking scheme which, had we had more time, could have been extended to be much better than how Bricklink does it. I was really into the whole thing. As in, it was the kind of thing I’d have fun doing a lot of.

Which is interesting because I didn’t really come into the program thinking “I’m going to be a cataloguer” or anything like that. I’m not anal about keeping everything in its right place, which I’d had the impression was a requirement. But I’m kind of excited about the puzzles sorting Lego can provide. And creating these schemes is sort of a form of describing, right? Describing stuff is why I write, and this is describing with a very controlled vocabulary. Slotting things into their place in the world.

readings: week one term one

September 13th, 2010 • library
Tags: data, diversity, games, information, information ecology, kay ann cassell, knowledge, libr500, libr502, libr503, mlis, monoculture, monopoly, myst, pessimism, reader's advisory, russell ackoff, school, slais, systems theory, technology, uma hiremath, understanding, wisdom

And here begins my bloggy notes on things I’m reading for school. If you’re following along, trying to get the equivalent of an MLIS degree without going to school, this is the stuff to read.

Monopoly vs Myst and other things about technologyby Nardi and O’Day

It is not necessary to jump on the digital bandwagon. It is dangerous, disempowering, and self-limiting to stick our heads in the sand and pretend it will all go away if we don’t look. We believe that much more discussion and analysis of technology and all its attendant issues are needed.

On Information Ecologies by Nardi and O’Day:

Diversity is necessary for the health of the ecology itself, to permit the system to survive continual and perhaps chaotic change. Monoculture – a fake, brittle ecology – gives sensational results for a short time, then completely fails. Information ecologies should be teeming with different kinds of people and ideas and technologies. It is captivating to wander through a rain forest and stultifying to be stuck in a hundred acres of soybeans. A diverse information ecology is a lively, human, intensely social place, even if it incorporates very advanced technologies. It has many different resources and materials and allows for individual proclivities and interests.

There was also an interesting bit in there about how they advocate constructing good info ecologies instead of resisting harmful ones.

What else? The first chapter of Reference and Information Services in the 21st Century by Kay Ann Cassell and Uma Hiremath. That one had some ethical considerations for librarians which were not unreasonable, and some good stuff about Reader’s Advisory work.

For another course we had to read a big heavy philosophical piece on Information As Thing. Evidently this is very similar to what Plato says about art as well. The biggest weirdness I had with that article wasn’t Information as a thing, but information as a process. I don’t think of information being the same as education, but the article kind of took that as a given and then went into all sorts of details about how information is stuff. That went really well with module 2 from LIBR500

Speaking of LIBR500: Russell Ackoff, a major systems theorist, wrote that the content of the human mind can be classified into five categories:

1.Data: symbols 2.Information: data that are processed to be useful; provides answers to “who”, “what”, “where”, and “when” questions 3.Knowledge: application of data and information; answers “how” questions 4.Understanding: appreciation of “why” 5.Wisdom: evaluated understanding.

And then there’s another thing I read that argued with that categorical system, because the idea of people being involved in Wisdom Management seemed unbearably pretentious.

And at this point I think I’m at the point of being whelmed with information. Not underwhelmed anymore. I’ve got a whole ‘nother day off tomorrow to read more supplemental stuff if I feel like it. I missed school.

career track

September 3rd, 2010 • library
Tags: career, chalk signs, cynicism, grad school, itinerant, metaphor, mlis, orientation, school, success, titanic, ubc

Yesterday I sort of began my library school career with a new grad student orientation dealy. It was for grad students in general, not just us wannabe information professionals, but that was good. It was good because it was this weird parallel universe where success is some sort of attainable goal. A world where people weren’t coming into a dying field with no jobs. A totally imaginary world.

It was neat looking at it from this perspective. This idea that “The success of our grad students is the success of our university!” and “Here’s how to be successful as a grad student” and “Succeed!” is kind of foreign to me. I mean, I wonder how many fellow new librarian students have this idea of success even being possible, and how many are just in it for some sort of job. A job the profession might not have.

So now read this post from the.effing.librarian. It’s about how libraries’ll bounce back, how we aren’t quite a dead profession, but it’s a hard time right now. My favourite bit is below:

The problem with being a librarian is that you can’t really do it yourself. You can’t open a private library down the street as you would if you were a dentist or an accountant. I don’t know any librarian with a business card that reads, “Have Books, Will Travel.”

Or maybe the librarian travels from town to town with a laptop performing Internet searches for people in exchange for a night in the barn and a slice of peach pie. And that’s how we’ll survive, leaving librarian chalk signs for each other about which towns are librarian friendly and which ones google everything and will run you out of town on sight.

from: http://effinglibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/09/sun-will-come-out-tomorrow.html
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

See, that’s the kind of existence I would love. I want that business card. Or I could just be in some out of the way place, making sure information is available. That’s the kind of success I’m looking for. All this bigger Success talk sounds wrong, or misguided or something. Naive maybe.

I shouldn’t be cynical about my (future) job just yet, right? Getting into Titanic metaphors when I’m just starting school? But this might be the best way for me to find an edge, a fringe, a periphery to do something interesting. Not just a traditional library job. Selah.