P2Pnet has posted that the co-owner of Teksavvy (an ISP affected by Bell’s bandwidth throttling) is organizing a rally on Parliament Hill on April 29 May 15 from 3pm - 5 pm. Please consider taking a late lunch or skipping out of work early (for those who work in Ottawa) to spend some time on the Hill to support this important cause.
Update: the date has been changed from April 29 to May 15. Michael Geist and others will be speaking at the event.
This blog entry by FIS classification prof Jens Erik Mai regarding the POPLINE controversy makes an important philosophical comment about classification in general.
Quote from Jens Erik’s entry:
Classifications are political instruments… all classifications make epistemological, ethical, and political statements; there is nothing new to this. The library blogshere seems to argue that POPLINE’s move is unprecedented and unacceptable… get a grip; what is the ethical assumption behind Dewey’s religion section? I don’t see any ethical justification in the introduction to LCSH…
While blocking a search term was an obvious misuse of what Hope Olson refers to as “the power to name”, this situation begs the question of how we decide what terms are included in classification schemes in the first place, and how we navigate who has a say in describing research documents. While the Harper and Bush governments are making the politics of information more obvious, the professional can take advantage of the controversies to give these kinds of issues in classification a higher profile in professional discourse.
How we construct subjects: A feminist analysis. Hope Olson.
List of Hope Olson’s Publications.
Participatory Appraisal and Arrangement for Multicultural Archival Collections, Katie Shilton and Ramesh Srinivasan
This entry in the Wired blog outlines responses from the John Hopkin’s Dean, Administrators, and USAID’s director of communications. Also included is some background on the Bush Administration’s anti-abortion policies.
The word is that “abortion” as a search term is being restored and an investigation will ensue. The American Library Association was quick to condemn any policy that gives priority to ideology over scientific inquiry.
UPDATE. April 5.
New York Times article.
Blog post from Women’s Health Matters including statement by Johns Hopkins Dean.
-PC-
During Question Period in the House of Commons yesterday, Charlie Angus (NDP MP for Timmins) questioned the Minister of Industry, Jim Prentice about the practice of throttling by some ISPs. Watch the video on Kevin McArthur’s great website “Mycelium“. Or read the transcript (see below) from the House Publications.
Jim Prentice says there is nothing he can do about throttling since the Internet is not publicly regulated. According to a colleague, Bell or Rogers subscribers should complain about ISP service to the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services, since “this may be the only recourse for consumers who are being charged additionally for bandwidth, even as that bandwidth is being unfairly limited”.
In the meantime, Canadians for Democratic Media have set up an action alert “Stop the Throttler!”, where you can send a letter to Minister Prentice.
House of Commons Question Period transcript from April 2.
Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP):
Mr. Speaker, average Canadians are being ripped off by the telecom giants which are arbitrarily throttling information on the Internet. This is about a practice of a few large players being able to squeeze out smaller competition.What steps will the Minister of Industry take to ensure that consumers who paid for access are not going to be ripped off, that badly needed competition will not be squeezed off, and send a message to the telecom giants that they have no business monkey wrenching with the free flow of information?
Hon. Jim Prentice (Minister of Industry, CPC):
Mr. Speaker, for the edification of my friend, the Internet is not regulated in Canada. We continue to monitor the discussion that is taking place, but there is no regulation of the relationship between Internet providers and consumers.We will continue to see how the issue unfolds.
Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP):
Mr. Speaker, the minister’s hands-off approach to hands-on interference is bad news for the development of a Canadian innovation agenda. Net neutrality is the cornerstone of an innovative economy, because it is the consumer and the innovator who need to be in the driver’s seat, not Ma Bell, not Rogers, not Vidéotron. They have no business deciding what information is in the fast lane or what information is in the slow lane.Will the minister come out of the Gestetner age and take action on the issue of net throttling?
Hon. Jim Prentice (Minister of Industry, CPC):
Mr. Speaker, I think virtually all members of the House could agree that if anyone inhabits the Gestetner age, it is the New Democratic Party. Members of that party would carry our country into the economic backwater that they propose.We have a well advanced Internet system in this country. It is not publicly regulated. At this point in time we will continue to leave the matter between consumers on the one hand and Internet service providers on the other.
A librarian wrote to the POPLINE database providers to ask why a search strategy, probably involving the word abortion, retrieved fewer results than it did 3 months earlier. The response was:
Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.
You can contact POPLINE here. You could ask that they make an announcement of this change on their website and provide a clear explanation as to why this term was eliminated.
POPLINE, is a database on reproductive health, population, family planning, and related health issues. It’s maintained by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
UPDATE: Women’s Health News has a great post on the topic, identifying work-arounds for the problem (for example, browsing the subject index instead of doing a search will retrieve articles on abortion).
A colleague sent me a link to a story in American Libraries that says that the EPA National Library Network Report to Congress calls for the reopening of the four libraries that were closed back in 2006, that they will contain collections, that will be staffed by librarians that will offer reference services and that 1$ million will be spent on this. The report was published after the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee’s hearing in which it was stated that “No library should be closed until its holdings have been effectively cataloged, evaluated, and digitized.” In February, a GAO report said that the EPA library closures were “hasty and ill-considered.”
Now if only something could be done to restore funding to our own Environment Canada libraries.