The Terms of Our Service | Peer to Peer Review
It's time to explain them to publishers Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MNFeb 3, 2011
| Photo by Debora Miller |
For the past week, I've been mulling over a post at Mike Shatzkin's blog on the topic of DRM. The solution to piracy, it seems, is to keep your content in the cloud, because the world is moving from people downloading and owning stuff to purchasing the right to temporarily access information. Problem solved.
The line that particularly caught my attention was from a publisher Shatzkin quoted. "The whole world is moving away from download and own, so DRM is a moot point—only the library fanatics and the digerati care." In the lengthy comment stream that resulted (more about DRM and less about library fanatics) Shatzkin assured me that he values librarians, but libraries are doomed because the public will simply refuse to fund them.
I wouldn't write off the public quite so quickly. The "library fanatics" come out in droves to defend their libraries when they are threatened with closure. But the assumption that I really question is that the public will also be content to have cultural assets owned by corporations and accessed through a pay-as-you-go system. (I particularly love the response from a "little old Canadian socialist" with a big heart. Yup, that's the future I want, and one I find more plausible.)
But the "libraries are doomed" theme is hard to shake. The other day an adjunct professor wanted to check some videos out, but hadn't yet gotten a college ID and wasn't in our system. While I tried to remember how to create a new patron record, we chatted about his course. Then he asked me "do people actually use libraries these days?"
I stared for a moment, thinking "well, you are using one, for starters—should I take those DVDs back to illustrate?" But instead I launched into a long and passionate answer bolstered with IMLS stats, ALA agitprop, and the tie between recessions and increased public library use. He got a glazed TMI look and said "oh, that's cool. It's just that I haven't been to the library since my kids grew up and what with Kindles and everything, I just wondered."
This was an educated man, yet he had fallen prey to the common syllogism:
- Nobody reads books anymore (except maybe on Kindles).
- Libraries are all about books.
- Therefore, nobody needs libraries
Though it's based on false assumptions about reading and about what libraries provide, it's a common perception among those who haven't set foot in a library in years. It's a curious combination of myopia (I don't use libraries, so I imagine nobody else does, either) and pride (I am cultured enough to mourn the passing of libraries; I am very special).
Books, still books
This odd conversation came back to me today while pondering some gleanings of my RSS feed. Two things in particular caught my eye and, like flint, rubbed together to make some smoke signals.
The first is a Guardian blog post pointing out that it's all very well to have millions of diplomatic cables and military secrets posted to the web, but if you want to make any sense of it, you'll want to read a book about it—and several books are being speedily put together to turn that pile of data into a story. Of course, even Wikileaks's founder, Julian Assange, turned to old-school media to get the word out about the significance of his leaked documents, a strained relationship described in a recent New York Times Magazine cover article. If Bloom's taxonomy were reframed as a hierarchy of needs, going from the relatively low-level mass acquisition of raw information to the higher-order need for information to be analyzed and synthesized, books are at the top of the chart. They offer context and interpretation that millions of primary documents can't provide by themselves without a lot of labor.
Or to use a different analogy, the journalists who worked with Assange to break the Wikileaks story wrote the first draft of history, and now they're polishing up the second—in the form of a book. And heck, even Assange went out and got a book deal (even if mostly to cover his legal fees). Why is that format so routinely pronounced dead in the face of the evidence that it is not?
Technology and freedom
The second item that caught my eye was a post at O'Reilly Radar, one that examines the yin-yang nature of social networking technologies that both enable the forward momentum of democratic movements such as the abrupt and massive uprisings first in Tunisia, now in Egypt, while at the same time enabling new opportunities for mass surveillance, censorship, and state control. If things are moving too quickly to use the machine for control, the state can simply pull the plug, as it has in Egypt by shutting down cell phone and Internet services. Blogger Joshua-Michéle Ross asks a question that sounds eerily familiar to me:
Is access to communications a fundamental human right? If so, should a corporation have the ability to abrogate that right at the request of a host government? As we watch the battle between the Egyptian government's attempts to throttle information flow (including how corporations defy or collaborate with these attempts) and the people's struggle to maintain access to communications, we are seeing the contours of a struggle that will exemplify the next decades of political and policy changes as we try to define the increasingly critical relationship between technology and civil liberties.
Wait a minute—hang on, isn't brokering that relationship in my job description? Oh yes, so it is. Libraries protect access to ideas and (now) to the means of communication and expression for our communities. We have organized ourselves to preserve culture and to be an unbiased source of conflicting ideas.
We're facing a situation where the relationship we have forged between technology and civil liberties is threatened not because of state oppression but because the corporations we turn to for cultivating and distributing cultural materials are cementing their one-way relationship with everyone else using new technology. They will retain control over the material they publish by storing it in "the cloud" rather than on our shelves; we will gain temporary access, but only on their terms. Librarians are working hard to rewrite the terms of service, but not because the ones on offer threaten intellectual freedom, but because we want to give patrons what they want, right now. This has had a disastrous effect on academic libraries, which can lose everything they've paid for if they can't come up with the scratch to pay for another year of access; it's not going to be pretty if public libraries make the same mistakes we did.
We shouldn't betray our public trust so easily. Coaxing these publishers to take our money, please, pretty please, is far less important than making sure our values aren't simply tossed away as excess baggage in enthusiasm for new formats. Somehow we need to make it clearer what's at stake to our patrons—all those people who come into the library because they love the public space it offers to share something they treasure: books. We shouldn't so quickly give up on being the public institution that has traditionally taken a stand for people's right to read widely without fear of the consequences, or a profession that opposed censorship and centralized control of what we can read.
We should be more intentional about stating our terms of service and sticking to them.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
