LibrarianActivist.org

Spacing Wire is one of my favourite blogs. It’s all about public space and partly about Toronto but mostly about public space. Back on April 15, they had a post about the transforming properties of architecture and cited Lisa Rochon who said:

These days, in the city of Toronto, architecture is understood as a major transformer. At times, large-scale urban design has taken on a spectacular dimension, delivered as a jaw-dropping provocation, an object to behold, the latest, stupefying commodity. But public architecture also resides more quietly, enduringly, within the deep folds of a city’s fabric, in that zone of the glorious in-between. It is found in life-sustaining libraries and in community centres that invite openness and tolerance and a just society.

That’s right: life-sustaining libraries. Thank-you Lisa Rochon. If you want to read the full text of her article go here. You’ll see that you can’t actually get to the full-text, which brings me to the point I was intending to make in the first place.

One thing I keep going back to the Spacing blog for is their link to Bug Me Not. BMN is where you can go and borrow other folks’ usernames and passwords to get onto password-protected mass media sites (including, for example, the New York Times, and, of course, the Globe). So go grab that username/password and check out Lisa Rochon’s article.

The BMN is a great resource: a sly nudge around the system. So if you have usernames and passwords, please share. Consider it your contribution to the information commons. Hip hip huzzah!

-S.

This is about as “fun” as the Friday Fun Links get…

Carl Monday, an investigative reporter at a TV station in Cleveland recently did an extremely sensationalistic sweeps-week sting operation (link to video clip) where he used a hidden camera to catch a twenty-something man masturbating at the local public library on a public access terminal.

The reporter confronts the masturbator (without even pixellating his face) then follows him home and confronts his family. The clip includes quotes from a local librarian who’s put in a tough spot trying to defend the right of people to be able to access whatever materials they want on library computers without defending the young man’s behaviour.

The online library community has been abuzz about this incident and many people (on both sides of the issue) have been debating the topic on the reporter’s official blog. (You might say they’re “Master Debabtors” (groan))

MetaFilter also picked up the story and has some some discussion as well.

Here’s one comment I particularly liked discussing who’s the bigger disgrace:

“[The reporter] is conducting video lynchings for the entertainment and outrage of the complacent, self-righteous viewer at home … the masturbator is a slight detriment to our society … the reporter, acting as a public judge, jury and executioner wielding the axe of humiliation is corroding society with a form of shame porn, embarrassing one person for the amusement of people who want to feel superior to someone, while reinforcing their paranoia about “those people”.”

Does anyone else think it’s funny that the reporter keeps referring to the masturbator as “having sex” in the library? I know he’s just doing it to make it sound more evil and degenerate but that’s a very Clinton-esque understanding of what “sex” is.

Another sensationalistic element pointed out by someone in the Metafilter discussion:

The reporter says they caught the masturbator “just across the room from the children’s section” So in other words, he couldn’t have been any farther from the children’s section and still be in the building.

I also want to make a joke about what it would’ve meant to the high school me’s self-esteem if masturbation really was the equivalent of having sex. But just in case my mom reads LibrarianActivist, I won’t!

(Update: There’s a follow-up story where the reporter goes to the kid’s trial. Unreal.)

So I mentioned in yesterday’s post that the Communities & Libraries interest group was one I hadn’t heard about before and here’s why: they were founded about a month ago at the CLA conference. At the moment, there are about 20 members, apparently, and 10 interested “others”. The problem of restrictive fees always comes up (Jason wrote about the conference fees on his blog), and I remember this discussion from earlier this year when someone was applying for a CLA conference bursary. One of the requirements of the bursary was that the recipient had to be a CLA member - which is kind of strange: wouldn’t they want to broaden the CLA’s base by bringing in the who can’t even afford to be members?

The ALA has a $50 first-time membership fee, which is good - perhaps a bit pricey for some, but a good policy. I’m not sure what their rates are normally because their site is messed up at the moment. One thing they do that’s good, I think, is let their round-tables charge whatever dues they see fit. For something like the Communities & Libraries group, that might be a fantastic option: total sliding scale.

Some of the people who’ve graduated from library school but haven’t found work yet are finding themselves sans CLA membership, too… which is frustrating (in a circular way) when they’re trying to find work. I noticed that they do have a low-income fee of $100/year (compared to the standard $200/year) which is great, but still a tough sell for people with very little money. But kudos to the CLA for noticing that they ought to have a low-income category. Next step: sliding scale with free conference attendance for student and first-time low-income attendees.

In the meantime, though, it’s good that the Libraries and Communities group is up and running - there’s an e-mail list coming sometime in the near future, and I’m sure the membership base will grow like wild-fire within the public library activist community! Time now for some closing remarks from Annette DeFaveri:

Personally I hope the [interest group] is one part the beginning of a movement within profession to build and support active and activist librarians. I am particularly interested in the philosophical and political ideas that we can bring to the library to help shape a vision for the future of the institution and for the evolution of the profession.

-S.

YouTube recently updated their terms of service to say that by uploading content to them, this gave them a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website.” The link above clarifies exactly what this means (including a response from YouTube’s marketing manager.)

That’s all well and good but the important thing is that this has led to a response from people on YouTube including a shirtless cowboy (!) who defends YouTube’s new policy and many many others who take on this guy’s points very eloquently.

J.

Recent news in the copyright world is Yahoo’s leaving digital rights management (DRM) off Jessica Simpson’s new song and making the download of the song playable on most platforms (my first guess was that they’re doing it because the song is so terrible that this is the only way they’ll be able to get people to watch or listen to it). So, presumably, the song can now be copied onto CDs and whatnot.

The bit that really confuses me is that Yahoo has been a really big proponent at WIPO of extending the Broadcasting Treaty to webcasting and simulcasting. The Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech, one of the big WIPO watchdog organizations) went so far as to write them a letter asking them to please back down from their position as “the single most active company pushing the Webcasting treaty, and many of the substantive discussions about the treaty have focused on Yahoo’s desire for a new IPR right for webcasting” (see, for example, one of their presentations to WIPO). What gives? Why is Yahoo so supportive of DRM for webcasting on one hand, but suddenly appearing to be on the cutting-edge of “free” with the release of the Simpson song?

I may have my analysis mixed up - but if not, I think Yahoo may be trying to build a reputation as an organization that supports open access (they also have the “creative commons” option on their advanced search engine), while working in the background, and away from the public eye, on securing all economic rights to everything they put on their sites. Dirty.

Are they assuming the webcasting treaty will some day exist? It was recently pulled out of an optional appendix to the Broadcasting Treaty and put into a separate document which will run on a different, slower “track” from the Broadcasting bit. Nobody knows if it’ll actually work out. What’s Yahoo’s guess?

Clarifications and demystification of the bifurcations are most welcome.

-S.