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LIS753 Essay 5

2005-10-30T11:07:00.000-08:00

An interesting lawsuit from earlier this year raises some issues that point out the nebulous quality of ownership and copyright of web pages and other digital information on the Internet. The case, reported by the late edition of The New York Times (8/13/05), involved two healthcare companies with similar names engaged in a dispute over the trademark. A lawyer for the defendant turned up some old web pages once posted by the plaintiff to use as evidence in the case. They were retrieved from a nonprofit database call the Internet Archive.

Since 1996, the Internet Archive has been collecting and archiving web pages – 40 billion web pages, according to their website. It is open to any user, and is accessible through their Wayback Machine. The user simply types in a URL and a date range, and then gets to see the archived pages displayed, with images, audio, text, PDFs, and other file types. Someone who does not want their web pages archived can type in a robots.txt command, or can simply call and have their material removed. This database is reportedly used regularly by trademark lawyers, patent searchers and potential employers, among others. (For a good overview see Greg Notess' article in Online.)

What is of interest is not so much the fact that two companies were engaged in a legal battle over trademark, but that the plaintiff ended up suing the Internet Archive itself for allowing access to what they believed to be copyrighted and protected material. They had tried to block access to these earlier sites using the robots.txt command, but somehow, the defense managed to get hold of them. (See The Patry Copyright Blog for a more detailed legal discussion of the case.) What makes the issue so interesting is the fact that these pages had once been available to the public, as they’d been posted by the plaintiff. They had been in the public domain. In fact, they wouldn’t have been archived if they hadn’t been posted. So, the question is, when is something on the internet actually regarded as published? And once it is, who owns it, and does the ownership preclude archiving? A report or brochure in print cannot be erased from the past simply because a company wants it so. Should the internet be any different?

Whatever the legal questions, perhaps the Internet Archive might play an important role in helping shape the internet, in that it will make people think strongly about what they post. It is like a large silent editor or conscience. Cases such as the abovementioned are probably making many people nervous about their existing archival material, but will undoubedly make them more careful now. In the end, something that encourages people to look before they leap will probably benefit everyone in the long run.

LIS753 Essay 4

2005-10-23T19:56:00.000-07:00

I spoke with a librarian at an art museum in a large Midwestern city and asked her how the museum library used the Internet and electronic resources.

This art library, one of the largest in the country, regularly uses a wide variety of electronic sources, the majority of which are online databases, such as art and architecture bibliographies and indexes. Most require subscription. Some, due to the cost and the limitation of the number of computers that can access them at the same time, have limited use or can only be accessed from the museum. One page, the union catalog of the Research Libraries Group, can only the used by librarians at the reference desk.

On the one hand, these electronic indexes have freed up a lot of space on the shelves, allowing them to put the print indexes in storage. On the other, however, these indexes only go back twenty years or so. And while they make searching for articles easier, only one of them provides full text articles. The rest only provide citations, so the researcher still needs to find the article in print or elsewhere electronically.

Some of the most often used resources are auction catalogs. In fact, they are the resource most often requested for ILL. Auction catalogs are used to establish the provenance of works of art and for price comparisons of works by the same artist. While many auction houses, such as Sothebys, have websites, they still publish the catalogs in print, because they are such an important sources of information. (This librarian mentioned that she had a friend who did nothing but catalogue auction catalogs.) But now, print catalogs have stopped listing prices. That information is only available online – by subscription.

Because local academic and public libraries know that the museum subscribes to these databases, other librarians often contact the librarians here, especially for information about specific works of art. Occasionally they will get calls from individuals who have purchased a painting –usually at a garage sale or thrift store – and want to find out who the artist is and how much the painting is worth.

The librarian mentioned that she rarely used the Internet, per se, that most of their research involved these subscription databases. However, sometimes if she gets a request for information about something with which she is not familiar, she will Google it to help establish some kind of context, so she knows which database to search. I asked if she read any librarian or other blogs and she replied that she did not, but that she uses a LISTSERV for art librarians, where she often shares professional advice and concerns with other art librarians.

For general use by museum staff, the librarians provide an electronic reference page via the Intranet, which includes a wide array of resources, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, search engines, copyright information, digital image databases, art history sites, museum gallery pages, and many others, even a chronological listing of the names of the Popes.

So, even though this library is one of the largest art libraries in the country, they make a lot of use of specialized electronic resources, especially for scholarly research.

LIS753 Essay3

2005-10-16T22:31:00.000-07:00

In an article in Library Journal (October, 2005) entitled, Where Learners Go; How to strengthen the library role in online learning, Joan Lippincott argues that it is vital that libraries have a strong presence on the web. Our culture, she states, has been transformed by the Internet into a society at which learning can take place at any moment, and libraries need to “become the place where learners go.”

She starts the article by setting up the idea that libraries now must compete with the Internet for learners, and to support this claim, she cites a statistic which claims that less than ten percent of college students use the library more than the Internet. She then goes on to explain what libraries must do to keep learners using library resources.

First, libraries must provide access to databases, databanks and other online resources, both licensed and free. And they must use all available media, such as free educational videos, which are readily available and can provide an excellent resource for students and adults alike. Libraries also need to have more visibility on the web, and appear as links in sites they think would be valuable to their users. They also need to encourage the virtual community via the web and be the place people turn to when they want to learn how to separate the virtural wheat from the chaff.

She cites many examples of what libraries have done to integrate their physical and virtual services. What would strengthen or inform Ms. Lippincott’s vision, however, is if she somehow acknowledged the limitation imposed by lack of money, one of the main deterents to the wholesale embrace of all technological resources and services. Many libraries and librarians are overtaxed as it is.

Ms. Lippincott, it should be noted, is Associate Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, an organization “dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.” It should come as no surprise that this article has a passionate bias towards the benefits of technology.

And what about that statistic cited above? On one hand, it can be seen as a wake-up call to libraries. But doesn’t it cut both ways? Do we want to teach students, many of whom are inclined to take the path of least resistance, that if something is not readily available on the Internet, at their fingertips in the coffee shop, that it must not be worth having? The library already is a virtual world, and one available to people who lack the money or knowledge to keep up with the march of technological advance and expense.

True, in certain regards, libraries are competing with the online world, but there is an infatuation, almost an intoxication with technology, that often creates a kind of panic. Vision is one thing, but applying this vision is another thing. The key idea in this entire article for me is the idea of “marrying the best of the print and online worlds.” (Ms. Lippincott uses this phrase to describe a successful use of the web by a Fairfax County library book club.) This idea of providing the best of both worlds is something that will eventually occur, because libraries will embrace it, not as a matter of mere survival, but because that’s what good libraries do. It is something libraries are in a better position to provide than anyone else.

LIS753 Essay 2

2005-10-09T20:45:00.000-07:00

In an essay in the August 2005 American Libraries, entitled “Google Print vs. Onsite Collections” Thomas Mann weighs in on the debate between Google keyword searching and the subject-classified searching that occurs in libraries. Mann has been a reference librarian at the Library of Congress for more than twenty years and is also the author of The Author’s Guide to Library Research. It is fair to say that he presents a bias towards subject-classified searches, especially in regard to what he calls “comprehensive searches.”

He cites the example of a scholar looking for an obscure piece of information about the French poet and writer, Paul Valery. Mann made an exhaustive online search, but then unable to find the information, had to resort to books. There were 186 books related to this particular topic. The one he thought most likely to help did not happen to have the information, but he noticed another title on the shelf above that he found did contain the information. He makes the point that he never could have found this information, even if it had been digitized, because he would not have known what keyword to search by. A researcher does not always know exactly what they are looking for.

I had a similar experience recently. I had to help prepare a lecture on the Spanish artist Salvador Dali. In one the the paintings being discussed, there was the image of a dead donkey. Browsing through his diaries from the same year as the painting, I found out that at the time he painted the dead donkey, he had a obsession with dead donkeys, and had received two letters from people each discussing dead donkeys they had recently seen. These two letters revealed interesting information about Dali’s life and friends, as well as this quirky detail, which ended up included in the lecture. A keyword search using the phrase “dead donkey” with regard to Dali did not reveal this information.

The problem with keyword searching, Mann explains, is that the researcher is bound by the keyword, not the subject.

I am fortunate to work at an institution which has an excellent library. In the time it takes to wade through hundreds of hits from Google, I can be standing in front of a stack of books sorted by subject, books selected by librarians and through which I can browse. (In the same issue of American Libraries, Joseph Janes, the Internet Librarian, reported on a study conducted by MSN which revealed that the average time people spend sorting through hits from keyword searching is eleven minutes.) Mann states that a keyword search for the information on Paul Valery resulted in over 3500 hits.

Keyword searching, as Mann points out, eliminates the possibility of serendipity playing a part in the discovery of information, especially when browsing through books that are arranged by subject. In my job and in my research, I rely on serendipity for inspiration and to help me stumble upon information I do not even know I am looking for.

LIS753 Assignment 1

2005-10-02T23:26:00.000-07:00

In his May 2005 column in American Libraries, Joseph Janes breaks down the content of blogs into stuff and connections. Based on what I’ve seen so far, these are useful terms to use to describe blogs. According to Janes, each blog contains stuff generated by the blogger, but more significantly, they contain connections to articles, other blogs, sites, libraries, databases, and so on. After looking at many websites, most drawn from Peter Scott’s Library Web logs, I chose 3 blogs to represent the range of stuff and connections Web logs can offer.

The Invisible Library is a site that represents what its name suggests. Although it is personal in nature and contains brief notes on daily life, it is not a daily journal but a chronicle of one person’s interests and philosophy as it relates to books and libraries. There are links to the ALA’s top most hundred banned books and to other blogs, as well as newspaper articles. It is a way to meet and stay in contact with friends and like-minded people. This is an example of a weblog that is more stuff than professional connections.

The DIYlibrarian is more professional in nature although it too contains brief descriptions of daily life. It mostly relates to her professional life as a librarian in a large research institution and as a blogger. There are entries concerning the status of librarians in academic institutions, insights learned while attending a Blog U. conference, and the relationship between key word searching and subject headings. There are also links to her favorite comics and music. So this Weblog seems to be balanced between stuff and connections.

The last and by far the most impressive blog is by the Vice-President of Research for OCLC, Lorcan Dempsey, which I suppose is no surprise. This blog is subtitled, “On libraries, services and networks,” and all of these topics are addressed in articles and links. The entries, while often personal in nature, always address an issue with links provided. For example, on September 26, Dempsey shares that his daughter learned the English, American English and Irish English words for pavement, sidewalk and path, respectively. Using that, he informs us that the English used in Ireland is called Hiberno-English, and then provides a brief history of it, with links to archives and dictionaries. Other entries address topics such wikibooks and web maps and looking at web sites. It is a valuable site for librarians, especially those wanting to learn what the digital world has to offer, and well worth perusing. This is an excellent example of a blog that is connections heavy.

These blogs run the gamut from the personal to the professional, and while the overall focus and number and quality of links may vary, they all offer the user connections to a vast community of people with similar interests and concerns.