A colleague and I will be giving a presentation at the upcoming CLA conference in Montreal on Net Neutrality and What it Means for Libraries. I’d like to do a small informal survey targeted to librarians, faculty or staff working in Universities in Canada by asking the following two questions:
- Does your university (or library) network administrator shape traffic (i.e. slow down or block traffic from certain sites or for certain applications – for example MySpace, Facebook, YouTube or streaming video or P2P traffic)
- How does this affect you?
At Concordia University, for example, Facebook is blocked (but not on the wireless network) and traffic is throttled at certain times of the day in order to “manage the network”. (I think the idea is to limit the amount of video streaming that occurs, you know that web 2.0, user generated world that we live in? Apparently a University is not the appropriate place for living and learning in the 21st century.)
This has obvious consequences on the library. For Facebook, it means that if we want to advertise there or keep in contact with University groups that have pages there, we have to work from home (not with the VPN, of course) or we have to work on a laptop using the wireless network (when it’s working. The connection in the library at Concordia is not very reliable).
As for traffic throttling at Concordia, it affects library databases that have streaming video, such as Theatre in Video. (Notice the warning we’ve put up)
Other possibilities include how it can affect teaching and research. See this great post by a professor at the University of Ottawa: The University Shouldn’t Shape My Traffic
So please forward this post around, and contact me with your experiences. (danielle dot dennie at concordia dot ca)
UPDATE: I’ve just found out the University has reversed its decision on banning Facebook. What welcome news!