September Links #1

The title assumes that there will be at least one other post with links this month.

From Salon, comes and an article about the trouble with Google Books.

And here is an interesting take on the concept of privatizing public libraries from Google's staff futurist. Not sure what to think about this.

Stephen Abram has a wonderfully thoughtful post about our freedoms and rights called
We strengthen our rights by exercising them. I highly recommend it!

There was a interesting series of articles about ALA's Midwinter and Annual meetings and the possibility of Reed Exhibitions taking over the management of the conferences and perhaps combining Annual with the BEA trade show. I first caught the Library Journal article which cited an article in PW. [Both LJ and PW used to be owned by Reed, but they are now separately owned by others.] ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels denied this was happening. My first clue was that I cannot find anything in the ALA Executive Board documents which refers to it, and secondly, the PW article talks about a combined ALA/BEA event in the summer of 2012 in Chicago -- when ALA's conference is scheduled to be in Anaheim. ALA will next be in Chicago in 2013. The schedule of dates and locations for ALA Conferences is set well in advance, and is currently planned through 2019.

Somewhere I came across this explanation of net neutrality on the Criminal Law Library Blog. It includes links to the AALL (American Association of Law Librarians) statement on the issue.

Kate Kosturski Librarian Kate wrote some interesting perspectives about the de-professionalization/professionalisation discussion which took place just before Labor Day.

Sarah Houghton-Jan asks questions and posits some thoughts about how libraries (particularly public libraries) are handling music in this day of downloads. I don't know the answers, but do know that it is something we need to think and worry about.

And finally some fun (with a shout out to Michael Sauers from whom I got this):

A Great ALA Program

I won't be at ALA Annual this year, however one of my friends, Sylvia Turchyn is the Intellectual Freedom Round Table's Program Chair. She has lined up a great program:

Burning Man, Libraries, and the 21st Century: The Intersection of the Individual and Society

Saturday, June 26 | 1:30-3:30 p.m.
Washington Convention Center, Room 143 B/C

Can you imagine living in a city where censorship does not exist? Where your First Amendment rights and liberties are not only tolerated but encouraged and celebrated? That culture is created and that society exists in physical form for one week every August in Black Rock Desert, Nevada in the community known as Burning Man. The Intellectual Freedom Round Table is delighted that Larry Harvey, Executive Director of the Burning Man Project, will join Lauren Christos, Chair of the Intellectual Freedom Round Table, in a lively conversation on how intellectual freedom informs the Burning Man experience and our 21st century society. IFRT envisions that our program will challenge and expand the boundaries of currently held intellectual freedom beliefs. Through the social experiment that is Burning Man, the audience may come away with new and creative ideas to explore intellectual freedom in their personal and professional lives. There will be ample opportunity for Q&A from the audience. For background information on Burning Man, please visit http://www.burningman.com

She is also looking for folks to blog the program itself (which I wish I could do), so if you are interested, send her a note.

Traditional Cultural Expression

One of the topics which is likely to hit ALA Council this session, is a resolution on Traditional Cultural Expression.

I was very confused about what happened at ALA Midwinter with this....it was proposed and then withdrawn, and at the time, given very little time to read and reflect, I was admittedly confused by the content, and therefore happy to have it taken off the agenda. That document is here (as CD#20.4, you will have scroll down).

Since then I have learned more.

Here is the document which engendered discussion, but note that it is not a resolution, but merely a statement. There is a web site, but it does not seem to have much newer than that to which I linked here.

Let's start with the definition of "Traditional Cultural Expressions" which is included in the document. In a footnote, the document explains the term.

For the purposes of this document, traditional cultural expressions are defined as, but not limited to, narratives, poetry, music, art, designs, names, signs, symbols, performances, architectural forms, handicrafts.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum, a librarian at Princeton, has written a long (almost 3,500 words) and thoughtful post which lays out many of the issues.

He starts by noting: "The basic thesis of the document is that librarians should be sensitive to the desires of indigenous communities regarding library collections of "traditional cultural expressions," i.e. objects, documents, etc. created by members of those communities." And like him, I agree with this in principle.

He has a section on philosophical objections which include his analysis of the language (which helped me understand). It ties the "cultural expressions" tightly to the creator or expressor. I think that is where I also begin to have problems.

I can't summarize or do justice to his long section on librarian objections. However, at one point he says:

Some parts of this document are utterly incompatible with such values. In the discussion, the other librarian posed the problem as possibly one of colonialist versus indigenous people's values. This is the cultural relativist perspective. But the Enlightenment perspective would pose it as a problem of universal versus local values. Who's correct here? Your position on this will probably determine your position on some of the more mystical portions of the document.

The tempting position to defend is that the values of the indigenous peoples should take precedent because they were both the victims of aggression and the creators of the "expressions." I'm tempted by this argument. However, one can be sensitive to the suffering of indigenous peoples without sacrificing universal values.

In his section with reasons to support a revised document, he has this cogent paragraph:

Returning some collections is also completely justifiable, but from the universal perspective of justice, not the local perspective of sanctity. Justice trumps even education and intellectual freedom. The important question is, how did these collections come to exist? Were they stolen? Purchased? Traded for? Acquired as gifts? The prominent libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick based his philosophy of distributive justice on the principles of justice in acquisition and justice in transfer. In other words, if property was initially acquired justly (via the Lockean proviso that enough and as good is left for others), and transferred justly, then whoever owns it in the end is the just owner. If we find at the end of the line that ownership isn't just, the principle of rectification requires us to reallocate resources in a just manner if possible.

Now, I would have gone even further and said, that if the "expression" had been legitimately (i.e. justly) obtained, then the control of it remains with the owning institution (library). It is part of why I support the return of skeletons, mummies, and the like which were pilfered from graves during the 19th and 20th centuries in the name of science and history.

My friend Melora Ranney Norman talks about TCEs with an "intellectual freedom" slant in her new-ish blog librarygist.

Her post is in a question and answer format. She is very up front about her issue in her second question:

Does it create a First Amendment/Library Bill of Rights conflict to officialize a document asserting that libraries should participate in the restriction of content when a cultural or religious group asks us to, whether by actually restricting the content in-house, or by returning it to the group so that they may do so themselves?

It was in reading this question back in early May that fixed the issue in my head...well, at least for now. If Melora's reading of the document (and I think mine, too) is that adopting the statement on TCE, ALA is suggesting that a group can control the distribution of something (folklore, stories, etc.) after it has left them, then we are allowing an outside "agency" to censor what we do. She uses an example of a group which believes that anatomically correct illustrations are abhorent, and therefore, all such depictions should be returned to them. She further cites the controversy of a couple years ago where a Danish cartoonist drew an image of Mohammed.

I have been going back to this over the past month, and still am both confused, and concerned that Melora is correct. If so, I am opposed to adopting the current version of the statement.

"We" have been promised that a task force, appointed by the ALA President will meet, listen, work on the document, and have public meetings at ALA Annual before anything comes back to Council. I hope that they can create a document which is both clear and inclusive, and that it avoids the pitfalls which Melora has identified.

At this point, what I long for is someone like Walt Crawford to gather any other relevant posts, digest them all, and offer his opinion from his perspective, which he refers to as "the radical middle." After all, this is what he often does in Walt at Random, and does incredibly well in Cites and Insights.