LibrarianActivist.org

Anyone familiar with UofT’s flagship humanities and social sciences Robart’s library knows that it’s the target of a lot of well earned potshots. Here are a few of its better known claims to fame:

is it sinking?
‘Brutalist‘ architecture
it’s a peacock … !?

The ‘prison’ analogy is another fave, what with the books cloistered into a closed stack system far, far away from the scant selection of windows.

Since 2005 however, quietly in a room in the library at St. Michael’s college, UofT’s partnership with the Open Content Alliance has been digitizing public domain works (books and more) for the Internet Archive. Blackfly magazine published an article (which inspired the heading for this post) in which Carole Moore, head librarian at the St. George campus spoke to UofT’s foray into digitizing public domain works in its collection to make them more accessible and the library more democratic. Articles also appeared at the outset of the project in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Owen Jarus at Blackfly spoke to how digitization can democratize and transform information through improved access, where WP and WSJ spoke to the business angle, mainly comparing the OCA’s initiative to the Google Books/copyright lawsuit situation. The subtext of course is ‘will we still need libraries’ if all the materials are online?

This week, I finished an intensive course on “Rethinking the Library” taught by guest instructor, Dr. Joseph Janes of the University of Washington’s iSchool. It gave a handful of lucky students the opportunity to have a forum to dialogue on where ‘the library’ is/can/should/isn’t going, and engage with the tough question of what was well coined by the University of Toronto Mississauga’s chief librarian, Mary Ann Mavrinac [a guest speaker] as defining our ‘core’. While this question is an ongoing subtext to librarianship, having a sit down in a course environment was a great move. So kudos to the Faculty of Information studies at UofT for offering a full course on this important subject.

The content for me is still percolating … more discussion on this later. In the meantime, if you have burning thoughts on the matter, please chime in!

-PC-

The worldwide series of concerts known as Live Earth have started today in Australia and Japan and will be moving around the world for the next 24 hours.

Although not directly related to Live Earth, there are a couple relevant sites you might want to check out:

• Earth Charter is “a declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society for the 21st century. Created by the largest global consultation process ever associated with an international declaration, endorsed by thousands of organizations representing millions of individuals, the Earth Charter seeks to inspire in all peoples a sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the human family and the larger living world. The Earth Charter is an expression of hope and a call to help create a global partnership at a critical juncture in history. ”
• The Earth Portal is “a comprehensive resource for timely, objective, science-based information about the environment. It is a means for the global scientific community to come together to produce the first free, expert-driven, massively scaleable information resource on the environment, and to engage civil society in a public dialogue on the role of environmental issues in human affairs. It contains no commercial advertising and reaches a large global audience.”
• And as always, there are pledges to be found - the good folks at Avaaz have one which they’re trying to get 50 000 signatures on (27 055 at this point).

- JH

The word is both Ryerson and Sam Sniderman are in support of Ryerson expropriating the recently sold Sam the Record Man store.

According to the Torontoist:

Sam’s the Record Man founder Sam Sniderman, 87, has said in media reports that he would like Ryerson to get the property. Sniderman’s children now own the property.

If Ryerson gets the land, it plans an expanded library on the site, but all of Sam’s will likely not be lost.

The Toronto Star confirms it …

If successful in getting the building, Ryerson plans to expand library and study space west across an alley and into the upper floors of Sam’s. It would look for partners to operate commercial space on the ground floor.

-PC-

Dan Kleinman of SafeLibraries posted a comment on this blog to Roma Harris’ letter to the London Public Library. He also responded to a copy of Sam Trosow’s letter that was posted to the LibraryLaw Blog. I’m reposting comments here that I added there.

Mr. Kleinman’s summary of the “Final Adjudication” of the ACLU v. Gonzales case is blatantly incorrect. Kleinman wrote: “ACLU expert and court agrees Internet filters are about 95% effective.” There is one mention of 95% in the Final Adjudication and it is on page 35: “Based upon the testimony of Dr. Cranor, which I accept, I find that filters generally block about 95% of sexually explicit material. Cranor Testimony, 10/24 Tr. 55:8-23.”

Ninety-five percent of sexually-explicit content is very different from “Internet filters are about 95% effective.” Ninety-five percent of sexually-explicit material filtered out provides no measure of overblocking — that statistic on its own does not in any way suggest that blocking of health information is NOT taking place! Nor does it address any of the issues about access for “women, GLBTQ populations, radical thinkers, dissenters, suspect communities, women, the girl-child, and so on” as outlined by Dr. Toni Samek.

The “pure arrogance” (see here) of librarians who would reject having a ballot question to address Internet filtering is misdirected. Any comment that someone is “not sophisticated” enough to have a valid opinion is of course arrogant — but that library administrator’s comment doesn’t address the issue at hand and to suggest it was the single and full response to Mr. Kleinman’s proposal for a referendum on filtering software undermines the argument. In what cases does a referendum decide what goes and what doesn’t go? Do we vote on rights? I don’t think Internet filtering should be decided by a majority vote by the public. Just as I don’t think there should have been a vote on if we should say the Lord’s prayer in public schools or if people should have access to universal medical care or if we should send equalization payments to Atlantic Canada. Likewise, intellectual freedom is not something we vote on: it’s part of the rights package we’re handed for being humans (with privileges, of course — universal human rights are many things but universal).

I think it’s far more arrogant to install a filter than it is to give members of the public the tools with which to analyze the information they get over the Internet and ensure their children are protected from online predators. It’s also arrogant of Mr. Kleinman to misquote a court decision.

Filters block access to information. As the Brenner Centre for Justice concluded in its 2006 revision of its 2001 Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report: “Despite the superficial appeal of filters, they are not a solution to concerns about pornography or other questionable content online. Internet training, sex education, and media literacy are the best ways to protect the next generation.”

Mr. Kleinman also writes: says, “What’s improper is that librarians do no work harder to make available at least portions of over seven eighths of the Internet.” Yeah well — we’re too damn busy trying to protect access to that first eighth.

-SIO