This post was going to be a two-line pointer to Godin's and Anderson's posts, referenced below. It became too long for a tweet, then too long for a Facebook post, and most likely, too long to read. If you survive it, thanks.

Seth Godin has written an interesting and provocative post on the future of the library, and more particularly on the future of the librarian. In brief, he argues that librarians, who should be the Vergils for future Dantes, are now seen not as expert guides in a sea of overabundant information, but rather as the people who manage that place where all the books are at. Libraries, he avers, are keeping librarians back. Excellent piece, and thought-provoking, and I thank Kent Anderson at the Scholarly Kitchen for bringing it to my attention.


One question (and one comment below): What about Europe, where the relationship between librarians and patrons--and, indeed, between readers and library books--is very different? I can't even try to fathom the different political processes by which European universities, university libraries, and other public libraries are funded, but I have heard many many accounts* of the use of a university library or archive, and the theme that comes up again and again is that the librarian or archivist figure is more of a Kerberos than anything else---not with respect to patrons but with respect to books: Kerberos would happily take you in, but he wouldn't let you out! When you use a library in Europe, your relationship to the books is much more heavily mediated than here (where the librarians are like bloodhounds snoozing by the fireplace; no interaction with them is needed unless or until you ask them to help track something down). The big distinction is whether the stacks are open for browsing or not, of course: may the patron wander among the books, or do you have to request something specific and await it? (This leads to my thought, but let me continue the query.)

I could see this relationship working out in several possible ways as more and more direct access to more and more information becomes more and more normal. Either the habit of putting requests to people continues, and librarians "hard power" by means of exclusive access becomes "soft power" by means of higher-quality access. OR the difficulty and cost (in time and effort) to use libraries (because of that mediation) makes a shift to electronic direct access all the more appealing.

A lot depends on politics and funding, of course, but more, I suppose, on whether the mediated relationship brings more or less value to the access. When you ask a librarian for, oh, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix's The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, does the librarian raise the issue of its Marxist slant, its flaws and its virtues, and suggest some important interlocutors one would do well to read as well? Or do you have to deal with a grumpy librarian to read something that some fusty old professor (we have only young and attractive professors here in the U.S.) told oyu you should. (See Sandy Thatcher's comments on the Scholarly Kitchen post; we in the publishing industry, must perforce think in economic terms of "Where can I add value?" and "How can I get paid for it?")

Now, the thought: One of the great virtues of libraries as "book warehouses," is browsing. Andy Abbott theorizes browsing thusly (starting in the last lines of p. 17):
random inspection of a local knowledge vicinity for items with a high probability of payoff, particularly in terms of taking one to productive new localities. It is crucial to recognize that this happens at many different levels in library research, not just at one: within books as one turns pages, on shelves as one searches for a book, in the stacks as one walks by unknown call numbers, in bibliographic indexes and other research tools as one glances through topics, and so on. In all these cases, the power of browsing is great.

Andy goes on, and I have to quote him at length:
Browsing has two requirements. First, the materials being browsed must already themselves be highly ordered either by virtue of their internal structure or by their places in an indexing or cataloguing or classification system. Otherwise, adjacency has no meaning and browsing can't work. Second, the browsers must have broad knowledge that primes them to recognize likely connections. This is the rationale for general exams, for example. (Note that by this argument, one can even think of conversation with other scholars as a form of mutual browsing.)

This insight provides us with a first reason why much of library technologization doesn't work very well. The assumption is that give "the right indexing system," you can replace the expert browser, and any college freshman will be able to write good scholarship. But this can't be true because such an indexing system would only work if it encoded the expertise of all the possible expert users. But in that case it would reproduce the confusion (of all the different possible associations to a given item) within itself, giving the novice no more guidance than the old tools. What technology usually offers, in fact, is the expertise of only one user - a hard-coded set of hyperlinks - which is obviously vastly impoverished from a computational point of view unless you can assume that there is one (or a few) right expert(s), which is seldom true in the areas that employ library research.

I emphasize browsing because such random search in pre-organized localities, although important in the natural sciences (it is after all Pasteur who said that chance favors only the prepared mind), is by no means as important as it is in library research. Library research as currently practiced is unthinkable without browsing. It is quite often the case that library researchers do not know exactly what they want ahead of time; indeed one might define skill at library research as the ability to recognize, when we have found something, that it is in fact something that we ought to have wanted to find. To be sure, library researchers are sometimes quite focused in their needs. But even during tasks like coding and focused retrieval, browsing goes on in the background. It is for this reason that artisanal researchers do not often subdivide their work and give brute force tasks to others; they worry about the loss of browsing.

Browsing in this extremely broad sense and at all these many levels is thus one thing that absolutely must be protected in the research libraries of the future. It means keeping materials ordered and in a setting where they can be effectively scanned in the random fashion that browsing demands. Since, as we have noted, browsing involves many levels of organization, all of these levels need to be preserved, not just the order of books on shelves.

The question, now in 2011, is not just "What is to become of librarians?" given the changing role of libraries, but "What is to become of browsing?" --- Is browsing in this precise sense, possible on the internet? Is anything else possible? (Or are we fooled by terminology--"web browser"?) I've complained before about some of the vices of Google books, for example, but Google actually does attempt to look at the organically-developed relationships amongst sources, and then present a list of possibilities--is that a (precisely) browsable list? But Google Books also assiduously ignores meta-data; the self-organizing instructions of scholarship--and I'm not sure it's started to parse things as simple and structured as footnotes.

Ah well. I've overstayed my mental welcome, and I've got work to do before the weekend.


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*I think immediately of Umberto Eco's opening essay in Candida Höfer's luscious book of photos, Libraries, as well as an account, source long forgotten but perhaps in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, of an American scholar's experience using Interlibrary Loan while on research sabbatical at Trinity College, Dublin. I may be generalizing over-much from tales of the Vatican Library, whose staff and policies are legendarily, erm, protective.

What makes a good e-book

David Pogue reviews Al Gore's latest here.

The key point: "Thanks to all of the smoothly integrated multimedia, the book engages more parts of your brain than just the one that reads prose. As a result, Mr. Gore goes much farther in his mission — persuasion — than he could on the printed page alone." Abraham Lincoln, when he wanted to study a text, would read it aloud as he copied it, on the logic that he would not merely read it that way, but write, speak, and hear it as well. It sounds time-consuming--but, then again, so is immersing yourself in a multi-media project with "over an hour" of narration.

What hath Google wrought?

Oh, Google book search, you could have been so good. But instead we have:

and

Threat Gap

It's been a while since I complained about the Homeland Security Advisory System, but I just learned today that it is basically copied from the French Vigipirate system.

Now, that doesn't bother me. You never caught me ordering "Freedom Fries," or pouring Champagne into anything but a glass bound for a table. What bothers me is that the French have more threat than we do! Yes, ladies and gentleman, there is a Threat Gap, and the French are winning! As you can see from the helpful graphic here, the French have dispensed with the useless peacenik levels of Green and Blue, but have developed a greater Threat Capacity through the deployment of the the color scarlet. (It's not pink, it's scarlet, y'hear?) "Menace certaine," they say. What threat can we possibly field against such a menace?

In fact, I fear that the epistemological sophistication of the French system (or, as they say, "systeme") allows for development even beyond what our system is capable of deploying without radical readjustment. Our system, as you can observe, while having a significant hue element, is, in fact, based on altitude. Low, general, elevated…The problem is that if we develop another threat level, the only place we can get any higher is in orbit. And, quite frankly, if we put the terrorists in orbit, I'm quite happy to leave them there.

A brief aside: I don’t have the stomach today to confront the appalling knowledge that while we have "threats", the French are armed with "menaces." When I think on such a prima facie difference in fear, I feel like a cop in a blue uniform, when the criminals get to wear black.

The French, on the other hand, have merely to develop NEW COLORS, because their system is based on ACTUAL METHOD. Yes, six years ago, it seemed that political expedience was a serious threat to our freedoms (I recall that right, right?), but, as Donald Rumsfeld knew quite well, the upper limit to what you can know is the facts at hand; the French acknowledge this with their first level, "No indications of threat." When they get to yellow, it is an "imprecise threat"--the dawning knowledge that we're not sure what we know. Red is a "probable threat"--the point at which, scarily, we know what we don't know. And red is "Certain threat"--when we know what we know, and it ain't pretty.

What you may not realize is that this leaves French Threat Engineers only at the mercy of their painters in developing at least two more threat levels: The point at which a threat is being actualized for one, and the point at which an actualized thread is being analyzed. And, I'm realizing with horror that the French academy has already been enlisted as a skunkworks for yet another level: the point at which discourse analyzing an actualized menace is in turn analyzed! It is possible that certain scientists from institutions such as The University of Chicago may be ready to confront this future level of Threat, but who knows if we can close the Threat Gap by that point?

Call your congressman today! We demand a Scarlet Menace, and won't feel properly unsafe until we have it!

Sale or license? (with a dash of California vs. New York!)

That nice boy from the midwest, Marshall Mathers, just won his case, F.B.T. Productions v. Aftermath Records in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This is, for lack of a better term, a pretty Big Effing Deal for electronic publishing in any medium. Here's why.

When authors or musicians (and other kinds of talented and creative individuals) sign a contract with a publisher, it's usually structured in the following way. Every time the publisher sells a copy of the work, the author (I'm going to say author, though the artist here is a musician) gets a cut, anywhere from, oh, four percent up to maybe twenty or twenty-five percent. (The more copies that the publisher thinks will sell, the bigger a percentage they'll pay to the author, since fixed costs for the work—editing, design, mastering, preparation of "plates" [digital or metal], and the like—become a smaller percentage over a bigger print run.)

However, if the publisher licenses subsidiary rights in the work to someone else, then the author and publisher usually split the proceeds fifty-fifty. This is because the publisher is doing work to negotiate these deals—they wouldn't happen without the publisher making them happen in most cases—but not, usually, investing much, if anything, in these subsidiary-rights ventures. What sorts of things are we talking about? Translations, abridged editions, adaptations into another medium (movie versions of books! comic book versions of movies!), licensed merchandise and apparel, coursepacks, magazine excerpts... you get the idea.

Now, here's why I think that the Ninth Circuit made a good decision: The [music] publishers were trying to have it both ways. They were claiming, when it came to their talent, that they were selling copies of the works to distributors, who were in turn selling copies to their customers. They were therefore accounting for any money that came in on these deals as Sales, and paying the authors a Royalty on these sales, as their authors were due in their contracts, maybe 5, 10, 15, 20 percent. However, the publishers were turning around and treating their "distributors" on these deals very much as licensees: the publishers made them all sign license agreements, which were only in force for limited times; the publishers retained the right—and the material/electronic capacity—to withdraw access to the work; the publishers only allowed very specific in short, they called it a license, they structured it like a license, and it quacked like a license.

The court said, "Nuh uh uh! You want this to be a license because you want to keep lots of control over the work itself. You can't go paying the author like you've sold copies of the work and don't have any control over where they go from here." Calling BS on any entity trying to own both sides of an argument is a good thing in my book.

Where will things go from here? Well, the article I kicked off with does a pretty good job of summarizing things: Fretting and complaining from publishers of all stripes, then someone will take a position "for the author" and "against the industry" and bang, higher royalties for authors on electronic editions (succumbing to what will surely be an increasingly loud plaint from authors and agents for such a raise). The ways that these institutions respond is quite familiar.

To give a little background for what's going on in the last paragraphs of the article: First, there is a broad sense that the Ninth Circuit is "more liberal" than the Supreme Court (see Newdow), but that may be more of an image than the substance warrants (I do have a day job, or I'd check stats for Supreme Court reversals of 9th Circuit decisions), and this isn't a straightforward liberal/conservative issue anyhow. Within the realm of publishing, things get even more complicated; while the Ninth circuit encompasses California, and, within it, a whole squadron of film and music companies, the biggest players in the publishing of words are located in New York, in the Second Circuit, and the Second Circuit has never felt the need to bow to Ninth Circuit precedent (I suspect that the Second and Ninth Circuits might even take a tiny breath of pleasure in taking a contrary position to what the other has staked out).

Third, no one wants to take this to the Supremes, since a broad decision is an awful big gamble and this court isn't knee-jerk predictable on these issues. So we're unlikely to get a firm, nation-wide binding system to establish the lines between sales and licenses, but we are likely to see more clarity about such things in contracts.

And last, the prospect of more direct-from-publisher-to-consumer sales of electronic editions is growing. In selling such editions, publishers can maintain the control they would have to use a license to maintain in an environment of distributors and retailers.

“Justice?—you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.”—Wm. Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

An open letter to Google

Please, feel free to cut, paste, and send this message to the Googleplex from as many directions as you see fit.--Dingbat

Dear Google,

Please cease and desist from claiming "Map Data (c) 2010 Google" in the lower edge of the maps you present at your lovely and helpful web page, http://maps.google.com. As any legal hack can tell you, data cannot be copyrighted. You are, at best, embarrassing yourself, and, at worst, stealing from the public, by claiming ownership over something that is our common property, the public domain. That's pretty evil, in my book, and I think your corporate charter says something about that.

With thanks,

Dingbat

PS: When you give transit directions to MDW airport (e.g.), you don't need to send folks to the MDW transit center, and then back out again on the 63W bus so that they can go in the "front door" on 63rd Street. It's probably a good guess that they want to go to the terminal, and probably a good guess, too, that the Transit Center is there so people can get from PT to the terminal. Cheers!

A forward, four-word Foreword

Read this book, jerk!